Case study: Using Mentimeter to engage students in Learn Ultra before seminars

Department of Psychology
Thomas Davies

Thomas Davies describes how he uses Mentimeter as a Padlet replacement for asynchronous learning activities on the VLE. Students submit responses to key questions before taking part in seminar discussions to encourage active reading and boost confidence to engage in the session. Embedding Menti allows students to view peers' anonymous contributions, helping them gauge understanding and prepare more effectively. He then provides formative feedback on responses and using them to structure the seminar discussion. As described on the Asynchronous use of Mentimeter page, the Mentimeter LTI has been made available within Blackboard. This is the recommended method of adding Menti into VLE sites.

Watch their presentation:

Using Mentimeter to engage students asynchronously in Learn Ultra (Panopto viewer) (6 mins 00 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi everyone. I'm Tom. I'm a lecturer in the Psychology Department at the University of York. In this presentation, I'm going to share with you how to use Menti for asynchronous learning in on-campus modules. So a bit of context for why I wanted to add Menti activities onto the VLE. So some of you probably know Padlet is unfortunately no longer supported by the University of York. So I needed a replacement for one of my courses because previously I'd used Padlet on the VLE with good success. So I wanted to still have an activity on the VLE, which students contributed before class to encourage active learning of their reading and to help promote participation in class discussion activities by increasing students' confidence before arriving to class. Menti is a good replacement for Padlet, as Menti open-ended style questions replicates the look and feel of a Padlet. Even if you've never used Padlet and maybe you just want to learn about how to add an active learning element to your VLE site that students can contribute to before class. Menti is an excellent choice for this.

In my year three and four seminars, students discuss the material in small groups before I open the discussion up to the whole class. Many find this intimidating, but VLE activities that are aligned with the class discussion topics scaffold students to feel more prepared and confident for the class. For example, contributing anonymously before class gives students time to reflect and plan how to express the ideas in class. They also like seeing each other's responses in the VLE, and it helps them to gauge whether they are on the right track. Again, I've had positive feedback from students and students seem to enjoy this. In class, I display the VLE responses and I offer feedback and encouragement. And generally at the start of the course, I'm very supportive and open, even if the students don't quite get things right on track. I'm really trying to reinforce and really trying to be positive about things, and I'm also scaffolding my responses and my feedback to students throughout the semester as well.

Okay, so let me show you a little bit around what I've got here on my screen. So on the right you've got the Menti website. On the left is just an example of one of my weekly seminars for my third and fourth year advanced social psychology course, which happens to be about political psychology. But this video is relevant to all staff at the university. So I've just got, um, some learning outcomes for the students at the top-left there. Um, I've got a bit information about what you doing before the seminar, information about the reading. I got a few discussion questions that they can discuss in the class. I've got to give them a bit of a heads up. Got a nice little video there from, uh, Jonathan Haidt. And then down here at the bottom of this page, I've actually got the Menti activity embedded into the VLE. And this is what your sort of Menti activity can look like.

Before I present the Menti, I've got a little bit information to share with you, that I encourage you to share with your students as well. So, you know, if it's the first time doing this with students, you know, just let them know that there's a new activity to do, you know, before or after doing the reading that you want the students to contribute to this menti and give them a little bit of a heads up about this. The purposes of this for me was to get students to think about the weekly reading. So the weekly reading was about a topic called concept creep. It's about the semantic shift in some of psychology's core concepts. And the paper involves six case studies - about different psychological concepts. And I just wanted students to pick one case study and provide a positive and negative example of a changing and the semantic meaning of different psychological constructs. At the start, this is what students see when they first see this site in the VLE It's just got some more information there for the students.

So further down on the VLE. So this is the results of, uh, activity that I got students to do last week for this seminar last week. So these are actually the students responses that they've contributed. And this is just one of the - the first case study, which was about the concept of abuse. The second case study was about the concept of bullying. This third case study was about trauma, so on and so forth. And there's six case studies there. But the topics of those aren't too relevant. But what's more important is just the fact that each of these grey boxes are things that students have contributed to and things that students have written in ahead of the class and that have appeared on the VLE in real time live so that students can see other students contributing. And students can also see their own responses before going to the class, and so they can see how they're doing relative to other students.

So Menti embeds really nicely into the VLE, I think it looks really good. So you can if you've got this, this, Menti slide happens to be quite a popular one So there's quite a few responses here. And you can see that you can just scroll down and it works really. Well, um, in the Menti. You click along and scroll down as well. So what are some benefits then? So for me as a lecturer, it's nice to see how engaged students are. And so you can see exactly how many students are contributing to the Menti. And you can also see when they contribute as well. Um, so for my students, they typically just contribute the day before the class. But that's fine. It doesn't bother me. Um, I can also see, you know, depending on the sorts of questions that you ask students, I can also see how they're getting on with material, what they're understanding well, and so it's also an opportunity for me to provide some formative feedback for the students when I go over the results of their asynchronous Menti within the classroom. So I go over these results with the students and show them what they did right and what they, when they could possibly work on that sort of thing. Students seem to enjoy these activities. Um, they've commented in my module feedback about how they appreciate any sort of group activities so they can see their classmates' responses in the VLE.