Learning Catalytics Alternative

[sinman]

Good afternoon everyone,

I wanted to see if anyone out there knows of an alternative to Learning Catalytics. A faculty member here at Stevens uses it primarily for live feedback from students for his classroom lectures. He uses the system to have students anonymously rate how well they understand a concept. If students do not understand, he will use that feedback to change the lecture material.

There is also the ability to input a variety of different response/question types such as graphical, visual, and so forth... It seems that the system can be accessed from most devices as well. He can also assign students into groups through LC, which is beneficial as it's a very large class.

Learning Catalytics was a great tool for this. Unfortunately, they have been acquired by Pearson and now there is a charge for each student to access the system. I don't care for this business model and neither do most of our faculty and students. If any of you know of an alternative out there, I would greatly appreciate the insight!

FYI: We have looked at PINGO, Socrative, and DropThought and are currently most interested in what DropThought has to offer...

Thanks in advance for your time...

All the best,

Sarah

[Stef_retired]

 @sinman , it looks like you have the Community stumped! I'm going to re-tag the Instructional Designers​ group to try to draw new sets of eyes to your question. Also, since it's been a while, perhaps you've been able to devise a solution independently. If so, would you take a moment to share the results of your research into this?

[sinman]

Great! Thanks, Stefanie.

We haven't been able to find any way to integrate learning catalytics. At the moment, it seems to me that Dropthought is a good alternative.

Glad to know I stumped the community!

[jmorris1]

I'm not sure if this would fit the bill, but BluePulse is a product that is designed to assist with student engagement and faculty development. It provides anonymous suggestion panels, rating scales, polls, chat and broadcasts. I've never used it first-hand, so I can't vouch for it personally, but I have viewed a demo provided by one of their sales reps. It may be worth looking into. Maybe someone else has experience using it in Canvas?

[lames1]

Hello All. BluePulse has been a great success at the University of Mary Washington in VA. It's a social feedback app, integrated directly in Canvas.  They are currently running their second session with it and is lead by their Office of Assessment. One instructor in particular has been a powerhouse and will be presenting his experience at the Mid-Atlantic Canvas Users Conference @UMW April 30. He has tracked an increase in engagement in his courses and feedback from students is both proactive and positive. Students can ANONYMOUSLY rate how well they understand a concept using polls in real-time and prompts for assessing the learning - a great formative assessment strategy as it allows the instructor to adapt the learning speed, content, etc. It's very visual as well and the integration with Canvas has been smooth. Check it out Bluepulse - Social Feedback Platform for Higher Learning,

[sinman]

Lisa,

Thank you so much for the information! I'll definitely check it out. I don't believe we ever found a solution to replace Learning Catalytics so this is great! Would you mind if I contact you with any questions we might run into?

Thanks again!

Sarah

[tande]

I will recommend Bluepulse to anyone  looking for a tool to promote engagement in the classroom. In the last three semester, some faculty at Mary Washington have used the tool in their classes and reviews from students have been excellent. The tool integrates seamlessly in Canvas. In fact, student and faculty use of the tool was solely in Canvas. Students generally like the idea that they can do a daily poll so their instructor could know what worked and what didn't on a day to day basis. One student wrote it is “a wonderful tool that allows students to speak their minds without being embarrassed”.  It takes some planning to successfully use Bluepulse for classroom engagement. You can contact me directly if you want to learn more about our user experience.

[kona]

 @sinman ​, something that a few of our faculty are using and liking is Question Press. The pricing is very reasonable and it plugs into Canvas, which is really nice as well.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @sinman ,

We are giving the Instructional Designers area a little bit of love and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie