Case study: Mentimeter in FSE

Mentimeter is an interactive presentation tool that can be used to enhance both online and face-to-face sessions, allowing you to provide opportunities for interaction and monitor levels of engagement.

Staff and Students can sign up and access a full featured licence by following the information on this page.

What makes Mentimeter a useful tool for staff in FSE?

We asked staff using Mentimeter, if it is a a useful tool to support Teaching and Learning activities.

You can see from the poll results below, Mentimeter is not only useful as a tool to check understanding but it encourages students to participate in formative questioning, with a  particular benefit towards students who feel inhibited with engaging in social situations.

As you might expect the most common question tool used for Mentimeter is the Multiple Choice Question, using a quick MCQ type test at the start of a lecture can help you gauge how much information from previous lectures has been retained by students.

I regularly use mentimeter to ask the students questions and conduct multiple choice quizzes in my lectures. It is a great way of interacting with large cohorts (~300 students) and ensuring every voice is heard! It’s a brilliant tool for formative assessment too – letting me know quickly in sessions what topics the students need to go over.

Jessica Boland, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering

I used it mainly to engage the large cohort at the start of a synchronous session, but also to gauge the level of understanding from the week’s content via a very short multiple-choice quiz. As it was competitive (fastest correct answer wins pride points) and anonymous, everyone got involved. I was slightly apprehensive as it takes a block of time away from in-class problem solving, but student feedback suggests that it was an important addition: e.g. “various challenges and quizzes on mentimeter allowed us to test our knowledge in a very unique way” and “mentimeter made the lectures more interactive which was fun”.
Daniel Lee – Lecturer in Chemical Engineering

Word Cloud questions and Open Ended question types are a great way to solicit questions and thoughts from your students to help you construct a session that helps address issue relevant to their current level of understanding.

I use Mentimeter at the start of open-ended workshops to allow students to set the topics we’ll cover in the session.  Students complete a poll of their confidence in understanding the topics covered so far, and can also suggest questions or topics to cover.  We then discuss the answers and set a topic list for the remainder of the workshop that addresses the most common concerns.  Students get to tailor the content of the session to what they need, even in a large class, and I get a barometer of how well the cohort is following the detailed concepts.
Suzanne Embury – Reader in the Department of Computer Science 

Mentimeter can be used for both online and face-to-face teaching, with a majority of respondents in this survey saying Mentimeter had contributed to an improvement in their teaching and learning practices.

I use it for collecting answers to open ended questions in medium sized seminars, it enables everyone to participate and I can respond and discuss the answers collectively with the class as they pop up on screen.
Ruth Wood – Senior Lecturer in Environment and Climate Change