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Comment by dreadsword | Hacker News Reader

Great concept - quality is definitely an issue in the classroom setting that traditional methods of control do little to address - i.e.: end of term surveys etc.

Thinking freely here:

Could you produce a report for the school's administration of each professor's confused/understood ratio?

As gee-totes suggested, a messaging system would close the feedback loop nicely.

Is there a means of authenticating students? If this tool became a means of evaluation, it would be open to gaming by cagey professors.

Anyway, nice work, good video, great idea!

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> Could you produce a report for the school's administration of each professor's confused/understood ratio?

That would probably make professors (especially non-tenured professors) either terrified of making use of the app, or terrified of tackling complicated subject matter. Even if administrator's announce they aren't going to use the data to decide salary or tenure issues, good luck getting the professors to believe it.

Feedback that helps professors improve is great. Yet another administrative metric that warps people's behaviors, not so much.

Having a group scared of your app is the mark of disruption!

I hear what you're saying about avoiding complicated subject matter - that's an interesting effect I hadn't considered.

That being said: I was the victim of several "bad" profs in university. Thing is I don't think they were "bad" - I just don't think they knew that they weren't "good" and even if they had, wouldn't have had any idea how move from bad to good.

I see this app as one part of a larger equation around designing systems that produce quality education. A complete suite would include tools for professors, administration, and students.

Thanks!

Great suggestion, producing a report is a great idea. I could even use the confusion data to predict exam test scores.

If students are going to be evaluating their teachers (providing richer feedback than confused/understood), then you're correct there will have to be authentication for students.

Be careful with cumulative evaluations - how confused students are may not correlate with how good a teacher is. And, if professors are going to be evaluated with the results, they are less likely to use the tool well...

For authentication, I'd make it so that when the professor each session, the class is given a random 4-5 digit code. That way the students would have to be in class to get the code and participate.

You may also want to think about adding the ability for the instructor to add different buttons, not just "understood / confused". You could then have class polls, or group questions to see how many people are paying attention.

This should all be able to be controlled from the instructor dashboard.

Good thoughts! The 4-5 digit code would be a good way of differentiating between sessions/lecture. When adding class polls etc, it my be advantageous to give each student their own account. That could conflict with the current anonymous aspect of understoodit.com though.

I'd keep it anonymous... you want people answering honestly and not worrying what the instructor might think. I'm thinking polls like:

okay class, we just went over big-O. here is an algorithm... what do you think the big-O of this is: O(n), O(n^2), etc...

Nothing that you'd have to keep track of the answers for longer than the length of the class.

Plus, if you added logins, that would just make it that much more of a setup / hassle to get classes going.

I agree about anonymity. I'm a high school teacher and there are a bunch of smartphone apps that let students send in answers to multiple choice questions that the teacher puts on the board (I think it's called SmartResponse). The problem is, all responses have the students' phone numbers attached. So privacy concerns make it so that an otherwise useful product is basically unusable. Obviously the level of concern would be different in College/University, but I think students might be less inclined to use the app if it is not anonymous.

That said, this is a great idea. This is the kind of real-time feedback that I would love to have access to. Many of my students would rather fail than put their hand up and ask for help. Something like this would really help them out.

Some bonus thoughts in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3921258

I like the idea of the code to authenticate students. I guess you'd have to watch out for selection effects in all of this too... an interesting challenge!

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