A typical challenge for lecturers is making sure that students are able to follow along in their lectures. This is particularly critical if the topic becomes potentially confusing for the students, who may become completely disengaged if clarification is not available. Students are generally reluctant to raise their hands to request clarification because of the discomfort associated with admitting confusion in front of their peers. Asking the students, “Is this clear with everybody?” often results in silence and sparsely scattered gestures that are easily missed. The lecturer is thus left to read faces which can be difficult at best and impossible if the class is large and many students are not visible. While not the most effective solution, the lecturer has few other options for avoiding the devolution of an audience into passive listeners who do not follow the narrative.

This paper presents a solution based on a technology that addresses the fundamental challenge of providing students with the means to express a need for clarity in a comfortable and anonymous fashion. Furthermore, lecturers are given a way to gauge collective classroom understanding at any given time during a lecture without being constrained to predetermined checkpoints. The result is a potentially smoother flow of information between lecturers and students. Preliminary pilot studies have been undertaken at multiple universities in Norway and the results are reported.

Keywords: Technology, lecture, information flow, classroom response systems, audience response systems, lecture flow.