Getting started
Possibilities
The iClicker system keeps track of which remotes were clicked during each polling session; it also records the exact response submitted by each remote for each question, unless you specifically choose to conduct an anonymous polling session (in which case it only records whether or not each remote submitted a response, whatever it might be).
You can thus use iClicker for grading purposes in three different ways:
- as an electronic quiz system, with marks being assigned for correct responses only;
- as a participation assessment system, whereby students get marks just for participating in class; or
- as a combination of both options above.
Good practices
From a socio-constructivist perspective, taking advantage of iclickers as a means of promoting collaborative learning through peer teaching and discussion is preferable to using them as a convenient way of conducting multiple-choice tests. (Please refer to the page on using iclickers effectively, as well as to our collection of short videos showing iclickers being used by experienced instructors at UVic.)
Students naturally feel more comfortable sharing their understanding, doubts and opinions about a certain topic when they are not under pressure to choose the "right" answer. In this context, allocating a small percentage of the course grade – say, 10% – to the use of iclickers in class may be a good way of giving students an extra incentive to be active as learners. (Please refer to the second tab, Configuring iClicker & iGrader, for detailed instructions on how to configure the iClicker system for participation assessment.)
Those instructors that choose to use the iClicker system to deliver quizzes and tests, or as part of a continuous grading scheme, should establish clear guidelines and rules to prevent problems such as:
- students whose responses were not captured during one or more polling sessions claiming that they did use their clickers, so something must be wrong with the base station or another component of the system;
- batteries in students' remotes failing during a polling session; and
- students losing or forgetting to bring their remotes to class.
Checklist
- Have you followed the instructions on the page on getting ready to use iclickers for each of the classes you intend to grade with iClicker?
- Have you configured the iClicker application and entered the URL of the UVic iclicker registration server (sqlhttp://www.uvic.ca/pls/BAN2P/iclicker.reg?c=) into the "Settings & Preferences" section?
- Have you downloaded an iGrader roster file for each of the classes you intend to grade with iClicker and saved it to the correct folder?
- Have you instructed your students to register their iclicker remotes?
- Have you synchronized the iGrader application with UVic's iclicker registration system?
iClicker: additional configuration
In order to use the iClicker system for grading purposes, you will need to configure both iClicker and iGrader, the applications (provided by Learning Systems or downloaded from the iclicker.com web site) which you should have on a USB stick (a.k.a. thumb drive).
The steps below for configuring iClicker are in addition to those covered on the page on getting ready to use iclickers.
Configuring iClicker for grading purposes
- Start the iClicker application.
- Select the course you want to grade with the iClicker system.
- Click on Your Settings and Preferences.
- Click on the Registration and Export tab and paste the URL below in the Security Code field. ("Security code" is a misnomer. This is the "address" of UVic's own iclicker registration server, which will enable you to synchronize iGrader, i.e., acquire information about iclicker remotes registered to your students.)
sqlhttp://www.uvic.ca/pls/BAN2P/iclicker.reg?c=
- Still in the Registration and Export tab (see picture above), ensure that the default option, General, is selected in the Course Management System section, even if you do use Moodle or Blackboard. (This option tells iClicker what kind of roster file it should expect to find; you will be able to download native iClicker roster files, as explained further below.)
- Click on the Scoring tab and change settings to your liking. In the example below, each response is given one point, whether or not it's correct. If five questions are asked during a certain class and a student responds to four of them with their clicker, s/he would get 4/5, or 80%, of the total number of participation marks assigned to the activity. (You can easily perform such calculations afterwards by exporting these data to a CSV file, opening it in a spreadsheet application and adding a column to calculate the number of actual marks earned.)
The next tab will cover information on how to set up iGrader, one of the three applications that are part of the iClicker software package.
iGrader: overview
The iGrader application enables you to view your students' responses to all polling sessions and questions; it also does simple arithmetics and displays partial and total scores based on how you configured iClicker for scoring.
iGrader "in the nude"
If you run iGrader before downloading a roster file and saving it to the right place, you will see something similar to one of the two images below.
This first screen capture shows what iGrader looks before any polling sessions have been held and when the example roster file that comes with the software package has not yet been replaced with a roster file for your actual class. You know you still have the example roster file if the only student you see is the fictitious "Tim Stelzer", whose equally fictitious NetLink ID is "tstelzer". And you know that no polling session has been held yet – or at least that no iclicker remote has been clicked during a polling session – because there are no iClicker serial numbers in red.
This second screen capture shows what you would see in iGrader if you had already held a polling session but had not yet replaced the example roster file with one for your class. Again, you know that you still have the example roster file because the fictitious student Tim Stelzer is still there. But now you also see some "student IDs" starting with the # symbol and followed by a code (highlighted); these are actually the serial numbers of your students' iclicker remotes, and they are displayed in red because they have not yet been associated with students' names and NetLink IDs.
IGrader will only correctly associate iclicker remote serial numbers with students' NetLink IDs and names if the five conditions below are met:
- Each student's iclicker remote must have been clicked at least once during a polling session in class. (The iClicker system only captures a remote's serial number when a vote is received from it.)
- Each student must have registered their iclicker remote's serial number.
- You must have downloaded a roster file for the class in question and saved it to the right directory (folder).
- You must have configured iClicker with the correct registration server URL.
- You must have synchronized iGrader with the registration server.
The good news is that the iClicker system will record and keep all pollig data, regardless of whether conditions 2, 3, 4 or 5 above have been met. Once all conditions have been met, you will also be able to view polling data in a more human-friendly format, but it doesn't matter when or in what order steps 2 to 5 above are covered.
On the next tab you will find instructions on how to obtain a roster file for your class and where to save it so that it is recognized by iGrader.
iGrader: roster files and synchronization
IGrader rosters are plain-text files containing students' surnames, names and NetLink IDs; these files are always named "Roster.txt". Even though creating a roster file by hand is fairly trivial, there are a few crucial details that may prove challenging for those not versed in the intricacies of whitespace characters and line break types.
Since January 1, 2010, all UVic instructors have been able to download roster files for any of their classes. We strongly recommend that you follow the instructions below rather than trying to create your roster files by hand.
Obtaining roster files: Step-by-step, illustrated guide
Go to the UVic portal (uvic.ca) and click on Sign in to UVic.
Now, click on My page.
Next, click on My Courses.
Scroll to the bottom of your course list and click on LMS (course link) setup. (Please note that the current system only enables you to see courses for which you are identified as the teacher in Banner, i.e., you will not be able to download roster files if you are, for instance, a TA.)
In the next screen, click on the Download iGrader Roster link next to the course for which you require a roster file and save the file to the appropriate directory (folder) on your computer. See below for more information on where to save your roster files.
You will need to download a different roster file for each of the classes that intend to grade with iClicker/iGrader. As all roster files have the same name, you should complete the next step (saving a roster file to the right directory) before starting the download of another roster file.
Saving a roster file to the appropriate directory
Once you've located the appropriate roster file for your class, download it and save it to the directory (folder) named after the class in question, overwriting the existing sample roster file. (Please note that the directory name will reflect the course name, course number and section number as explained in step 5 on the page on getting ready to use iclickers.)
All the class directories are found inside the suitably named "Classes" directory, which in turn is located in the root (uppermost) directory, normally called "iclicker Win" or "iclicker Mac", depending on which operating system you are using. The screen capture below shows the location of the directory for the fictitious course Theocentric Anthropology 515, section F:
You can now check that you have successfully downloaded the correct roster file and overwritten the sample roster that was created by iClicker when you added a course. Simply open the file named Roster.txt inside the folder named after the class in question: if it looks like the first image below, you still have the sample roster file and need to try tha above operation again; if it looks like the second image (with the names and NetLink IDs of your students, of course), you have succeeded.
If you run iGrader now, you should see the NetLink IDs (or last names, depending on your selection in the top menu) of all your students. If you have already held any polling sessions in class during which students used their clickers, further down the iGrader screen you will also see iclicker remote serial numbers. Both student IDs and iclicker serial numbers will be displayed in red, signifying that the names have not yet been associated with iclicker serial numbers and vice-versa.
Synchronizing iGrader
In order to associate student names and IDs (which come from the roster file you have downloaded) with iclicker remote serial numbers (which are captured when remotes are clicked while a polling session is under way), you have to synchronize iGrader with the online registration server.
A synchronization attempt will only be successful if:
- the computer on which you are running the synchronization has an internet connection (so, if you're using a laptop on campus, make sure its wireless connection is working);
- your students have registered their iclicker remotes;
- your students have clicked their remotes at least once during a polling session in class.
While the first condition is a sine qua non, you will still be able to complete a partially successful synchronization of only part of your students have registered their clickers and/or clicked in class. This means that each time you run a synchronization, iGrader will be able to associate newly-registered student remotes with serial numbers stored from polling sessions held to date. There are no risks in synchronizing iGrader multiple times; in particular, existing polling data will not be lost.
In order to start synchronizing iGrader, simply click on the "Synchronize Student Web Registrations" button.
You will first be asked to confirm that you want the synchronization to proceed, and then the actual synchronization will happen very fast. You may not even see the number of synchronized records going up unless you have hundreds of students. The result screen will look similar to the image below:
Every once in a while, you may encounter unusual situations such as:
- a student who has more than one NetLink ID (highly irregular, but not impossible);
- one of your students may be sharing an iclicker with a friend, but has not registered the remote under their own name (which they can safely do); or
- someone might be using a second-hand clicker that they have not yet re-registered under their own name (which they should do).
In any of the above cases, the result is that iGrader will not find an exact match. When this happens, it will pause the process and ask you to confirm whether or not the problematic record should be synchronized, as in the image below. It is up to you to decide whether to accept the proposed match, skip the record, or cancel the synchronization process altogether (thus reversing all other matches from the current sync run).
Once a synchronization run completes successfully, you will notice that some, or most – if not all – student IDs have turned blue, as in the screen capture below; this means that these student records are now associated with an iclicker remote serial number.
There might still be some student IDs in red. Possible causes for this are:
- students in question have not yet registered their iclicker remotes;
- students registered their remotes at iclicker.com instead of using UVic's own registration server (please remind them that they must register their remotes on the UVic server for legal reasons); or
- students have registered their remotes but have never actually clicked them during a polling session in class, so that the iclicker receiver has never captured and logged those remotes' serial numbers.
As soon as these students have registered their remotes, another synchronization run will turn their names blue.
Finally, at the bottom of the list you may still see some iclicker remote serial numbers in red. These remotes have been clicked in class, but have not been associated with any students yet, for either of the following reasons:
- they haven't yet been registered by their owners; or
- they were clicked in a nearby location and their signal was captured by the receiver in your classroom, in which case you should simply ignore them.
The following tab contains detailed information about how to use iGrader data and publish grades.
iGrader: publishing grades
The instructions below will guide you through the process of exporting grades from iGrader and publishing them to your Moodle course. This tab also contains information on where raw polling data can be found within the iClicker directory structure and how you can manipulate those data directly using, for instance, a spreadsheet application. (Our thanks to Dr. Stephen Lindsay for contributing material for this tutorial.)
Exporting grades from iGrader
- Using iGrader's "Export Selected Session(s) as csv (Excel) file" button, generate a csv file for each lecture during which points were earned, labelled by student ID.
- It is helpful if the file name indicates the date or number of the lecture, e.g., "iclicker_2010-03-05.csv". (Using dates in "year-month-day" format has the advantage of making it easy to organize files in chronological order if you simply sort them by name.)
- Open the csv file created above in Excel or any other spreadsheet application and delete any students who have not yet registered their iclickers (these will show up at the bottom of the file, identified by the iclicker serial numbers instead of the students' NetLink id). If you do not delete all the rows identified by iclicker serial numbers, the import will fail (you will get an error message). Save the edited file, keeping it in csv format.
Publishing iClicker grades in Moodle
- Log into your Moodle course, click on "Turn editing on" and create an "offline activity" for each lecture. Again, it is helpful to use the lecture date or number as the name of each activity. Note that the icons for these offline activities will be of no use, so it's not a bad idea to put them at the bottom of the page to minimize clutter.
- You must now type a name and a description for each "assignment" (i.e. your iClicker polling activity). The only other settings you should change are grade (leaving the default total out of 100 can be confusing for students) and availability start and end dates (which should be disabled, lest students be warned that they have an assignment due, which is not actually true).
- Still in Moodle, click on "Gradebook" (or "Grades"), then click on the "Import" tab, then browse to the location of the csv file and select and upload it, accepting the defaults. You should see a screen that looks like the screenshot below. Click on "Upload grades".
- Under "Identify user by", for "Map from" leave it at the default ("ignore"), and for "Map to" select "username" (this is crucially important, as "userid" in Moodle does not correspond to students' NetLink ids). Under "Grade item mappings", leave "Student id" at the default ("ignore", since you don't actually want to publish student ids). Now change the next line (identified by the date of the iclicker polling session in question) to the name of the activity you created in step 2. Finally, click on "Upload grades".
- If the import is successful (which it normally will be, unless there are still rows in the csv file identified by iclicker serial numbers), you may get a simple success message, or something like the screenshot below. This message simply informs you that the students listed are present in the csv file but not in your Moodle course, so Moodle has ignored them. (This may happen if a student dropped out of your course but is still present in your iClicker roster file.)
Manipulating raw polling data
IClicker stores all polling data in simple text files in the "SessionData" subdirectory of the course directory, as in the image below.
Each polling session (not each question, but each sequence of questions asked after you click on iClicker's "start session" button) generates separate files, one of which is in CSV format (see highlighted files in the image above). Each csv file is named L + year + month + day + hour + minute, so L1002261244.csv contains data for the polling session that was started on February 26, 2010, at 12:44h.
Note: If for any reason you end a polling session and then start another during the same class, separate columns will appear in iGrader and separate data files will be generated.
You can open any of these data files in a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc. The screen shot below shows the structure of a typical data file, which is fairly self-explanatory; a few items are explained for illustration purposes.
You will notice that votes in the data files are identified by iclicker remote serial numbers, not student IDs. The data file that contains the correspondence between students and iclicker serial numbers is "RemoteID.csv", which can be found in the same directory as all the session data files. (Note: "RemoteID.csv" only contains information for iclicker remotes that have already been registered and synchronized with your iGrader application.)
Before opening any of these data files, it is a good idea to copy them elsewhere, i.e., outside of the iClicker directory structure. That way you can make any changes you want without fear of preventing iGrader from displaying the correct information.
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