Asynchronous use of Mentimeter

Summary

How to switch to 'survey mode' to use Mentimeter for asynchronous interaction to make the question types and features available in Mentimeter available to support online learning and independent study between live sessions.

You can change your Mentimeter presentation settings to make a presentation available for students to respond asynchronously in their own time by switching from ‘Presentation mode’ to ‘Survey mode’.

You can also use the Mentimeter LTI tool to include Mentimeter presentations within your Blackboard VLE site. This can be done anonymously, or you can gather names with responses. You can also link the Menti to the VLE site gradebook to be able to see engagement and performance data in the VLE site.

Once the results are in, you can display them live to give feedback in a subsequent session, or asynchronously by embedding them in your VLE site or downloading and sharing the results as a pdf or excel file.

You can change your Mentimeter presentation settings to make a presentation available for students to respond asynchronously in their own time by switching from ‘Presentation mode’ to ‘survey mode’.

Survey mode

To activate survey mode, select ‘survey’ from settings. The word ‘survey’ will appear next to the title of your presentation. You can adjust the settings to allow multiple responses on the same device by selecting the option.

Other useful options in settings include an option to check the accessibility of your presentation, change the presentation language, and switch on the profanity filter to automatically mask or remove open responses containing words that are included in the profanity dictionaries.

Warning

If you are using Menti asynchronously you must switch to survey mode. If you do not, students will not be able to work through the questions in their own time; they will only see the slide that you have active at your end.

Sharing your survey so that students can participate

Survey mode can sometimes be useful for live sessions if, for example, you would like students to be able to work through your questions at their own pace. In this case you can share the QR code and/or join code from the front as normal. After giving students time to complete the activity, you can then also share results as normal, either by displaying them from the front or sharing them after your session.

You can also share a participation link to your survey for students to complete asynchronously between teaching sessions. Please note that while the participation link and QR code never expire, the join code will expire (2 days by default; extendable to 7 or 14 days) so is only suitable for sharing asynchronously if you are sure that the activity will be complete within this period and no students will need to respond after the code expires. If you are using Mentimeter asynchronously within the Blackboard VLE, the Mentimeter LTI provides the best option for embedding your Menti.

Menti in the VLE: The Mentimeter LTI tool

The Mentimeter LTI tool provides the recommended option for embedding a Mentimeter presentation into your Blackboard Ultra VLE site for students to respond to asynchronously. It offers a number of advantages:

• The Mentimeter presentation is displayed in its own VLE page so that students can complete it without leaving the VLE site.
• It is possible to add access control so that only students who are logged on to the VLE site are able to interact with the Mentimeter presentation.
• You can collect student input anonymously as normal or opt to collect student names with their responses. Feedback from both staff and students suggests that anonymity is valued highly for inclusive engagement so we recommend considering carefully before opting to collect names and engaging in clear communication with students so that they understand the rationale and are clear on how this data will be used.
• Student engagement with the Mentimeter presentation can be surfaced in the gradebook allowing students to see a ‘grade’ for participation and attendance, and allowing you to see a summary in the VLE.
• Collaborator access to the Mentimeter presentation will automatically be given to instructors who access it via the VLE site, ensuring that results are fully accessible to all instructors and changes can be made by any instructor as needed.

Adding a presentation

Navigate to the section of the site you would like to add your presentation to and click on the plus icon. Select ‘Content market’ from the options and then choose Mentimeter from the alphabetical list of tools available.

The first time you attempt to add a Mentimeter presentation through the LTI tool, you will need to connect to your Mentimeter account (see the logging in page for information about creating a Mentimeter account).

Click on the ‘Log in’ button and log in to your account to authorise the connection and you should see a confirmation message confirming that your accounts have been successfully linked. Close the tab to return to your VLE site:

When you close the tab, you should see your Mentimeter presentations, with any folders visible at the top and your recent presentations visible as thumbnails.

You should create your presentation in Mentimeter before attempting to add it. If you have a presentation that has already been added to a VLE site using the LTI tool, you should duplicate the presentation and rename it ready to be added.

Find the presentation and choose the ‘Select’ button.

Any presentations that you have already added to VLE sites will display an ‘Add again’ option instead of ‘Select’.

If you attempt to add a presentation that has already been used, you will see information about where the presentation has been used, when and by whom it was added, and whether it has results. You will also see a warning that adding the same presentation to the VLE more than once may cause conflicts and you will be given the option to create a duplicate instead.

If possible, you should avoid this by duplicating and renaming the presentations you need in advance. However, choosing ‘Duplicate and add’ will create the duplicate in your Mentimeter account and add it to your VLE site. This will be named using the original presentation name prefixed with ‘Copy of…’.

Once you have selected your presentation, you will see two options: 'anonymous’ or ‘graded’.

The ‘Anonymous’ option

The ‘anonymous’ option can be used in different ways, both anonymously and non-anonymously, by adjusting the settings of a Mentimeter presentation added using the LTI. There are three options that can be found under the ‘participant interactivity’ settings within Mentimeter (indicated with a pointing finder icon alongside the editing interface and labeled ‘1’ in the image below):

• Participants are required to Log in (2)
• Participants names are required (3)
• Names are visible to participants (4)

You will be shown a summary of the outcome of selecting each combination of options (5).

To create an anonymous presentation, leave the ‘log in required’ and ‘participant names are required’ options both off. Students will be able to access the presentation from the VLE page and respond anonymously. They will also be able to connect and respond outside the VLE if they have a participation link or the QR or participation code.

If you would like to control access to the Mentimeter presentation so that each student can only respond once and/or so that they can only access it from the VLE site and not via a code, select ‘Participants are required to log in’.

When students view a Mentimeter presentation in the VLE, they will not be asked for a log-in because Mentimeter will recognise that they are already logged onto the VLE site. They will be able to respond as normal but, once they have submitted, it will prevent them from making a resubmission even if they use a different device. If they have a link or code to access the presentation outside of the VLE, they will see a message telling them that they cannot do so and directing them to return to the VLE (LMS) to open it.

Using this option, responses remain anonymous, but they can only be made by students who can access the VLE site.

If you would like to switch off anonymity so that you can see how different students responded, switch on ‘Log in required’ and ‘Participant names are required’.

This presents you with a further ‘Names are visible to participants’ option. If you deselect this, the names will only be visible to instructors within the Mentimeter results and they will not be displayed on the results slides. If you select it, responses names will be visible in the slides display for some question types. For example, Q&A will show the names in full above each question, while multiple choice questions will show initials and allow names to be seen in full by clicking on the initials.

See the following Mentimeter help pages for further information about these verified participation options and for some example use cases in which different permutations of the options above might be most suitable for different scenarios.

The ‘Graded’ option

The ‘graded’ option is only useful when you would like to integrate your Mentimeter presentation with your VLE site gradebook. When you have linked a presentation using this option, a column will automatically appear in the VLE site gradebook with the name of the Mentimeter presentation. You can see results in the Mentimeter presentation itself as normal, and you can also sync one of the following ‘grades’ from your presentation to the gradebook:

1. Attendance. Students who have responded to at least one question will be given a grade of 100/100. Those who have not opened it will have no grade.
2. Participation. Students will be given a score /100 to represent the proportion of questions that they have responded to. Those who have not opened it will have no grade.
3. Grade. Note, this cannot be used for asynchronous activities. It relates to a very specific use case where you would like to run a quiz competition live during a session but have the results added to the gradebook afterwards. Students will be given a score out of 100 to represent the proportion of questions they answered correctly during the live session. Response times are not factored into the grades, even if you choose ‘Time-based’ score allocations for the live session.

Some key points to note are:

• You do not need to use the graded option to make a Mentimeter survey non-anonymous using the LTI. Providing you have activated ‘Require log on’ and ‘Show participant’ names, the anonymous option will work for this.
• Until you sync the ‘grades’, the gradebook will show ‘not marked’ in the column.
• When you sync to the VLE, the grades are automatically posted to students and they will receive notifications of a new grade.
• You can re-sync at any time with either the same choice of ‘grade’ or an alternative one, eg. switching ‘attendance’ to ‘participation’ as the displayed grade. This will automatically overwrite and repost the grades. Any students who already have a grade in the column will receive a notification of a new grade once the sync takes place.
• The graded option requires the ‘Login required’ and ‘Participant names are required’ options to be switched on. Setting up a graded LTI presentation will automatically activate these options and you must leave them on to be able to sync results to the gradebook column.
• Before any results are received you can change the ‘Names are visible to participants’ setting for names to be displayed within the results. If you select it, responses will have names attached to them in the slides display. If you leave it deselected, the names will only be visible to instructors within the Mentimeter results and they will not be displayed on the results slides.
• Once results are received you will no longer be able to change any of the options above without resetting the results.
• Students can return to the participation view either from the content item or the gradebook but they cannot re-do any responses that they have already made. These can be skipped to allow the student to progress to any questions they missed the first time around, but there is no flagging to indicate which questions have already been answered. Students may see a ‘start over’ option but this will not work with a Mentimeter presentation that requires a log-in.
• Students are not able to view the results from the content item. The gradebook will show them the grade but they will not be able to view the results from there. See the sharing results section below for details.

In most cases, the anonymous option will provide the better option unless there is a clear reason why you would like the grades to be synced to the VLE site, for example, as part of a formative assessment strategy. Contact us if you would like to discuss these options further.

Sharing your results

Once your asynchronous mentimeter presentation has results, you can share these with students live in a session by opening the presentation from your mentimeter account and choosing ‘present’. Make sure results are unhidden when giving your feedback.

You can also share your results asynchronously. Please note that results will not be made visible via the LTI and you will need to share them separately if you would like to make them visible to students.

1. Make sure that you have set the access level correctly in Mentimeter from the ‘Share options’.

If your presentation is fully anonymous, you can select ‘Public’:

For a non-anonymous Menti, the ‘Public’ option will not be selectable.

1. Set the share option to ‘Limited’.

2. Copy the link and paste it into a text editor to use in the VLE.

3. Similarly copy and paste the embed code so that you have both to hand when you add them to the VLE.

1. Navigate to your VLE site and choose an appropriate place to embed the results. For example, you may choose to add a Mentimeter LTI item on one page of a learning module, and embed the results on a subsequent page.

The results will update automatically once they are received (the VLE page will need to be refreshed for updated results to be visible to anyone who is already viewing the page). You could choose to make them immediately available or at a specific time when you expect the activity to be complete.

1. Create a document with a content block for any introductory text and a link to open the menti results in a new window (it is good practice to include a link above the embed to ensure that it will be accessible even on a device with a very small screen or if a participant cannot see the embed frame for any reason). Use the link you copied at step 2 above. This should be followed by an HTML block allowing you to paste the embed code you copied at step 3 above:

You can also download the results in Excel or accessible pdf formats to add them to your VLE site. If the results form an important part of the teaching record for your module, you should always download them from Mentimeter and include them in your VLE site rather than relying solely on sharing the Mentimeter presentation itself. As with all digital resources, it is essential to consider accessibility.