Audience Response

Audience response is a type of interaction associated with the use of audience response systems, to create interactivity between a presenter and his/her audience. Systems for co-located audiences combine wireless hardware with presentation software, and systems for remote audiences may use telephones or web polls for audiences watching through television or the Internet. In educational settings, such systems are often called "student response systems" or "personal response systems." The hand-held remote control that students use to convey their responses to questions is often called a "clicker." More recent entrants into the market do not require specialized hardware, however. Open-source, cloud-based tools such as ChimeIn allow responses from the audience using a range of personal computing devices such as cell phones, smartphones, and laptops. These types of systems have added new types of functionality as well, such as free text responses that are aggregated into sortable word clouds, as well as the more traditional true/false and multiple choice style questions. This type of system also mitigates some of the concerns articulated below in the "Challenges of audience response" section; however, they lose some of the benefits of the commercial offerings, in that they don't integrate with standard presentation software such as PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, or Google Presenter, and must be run in a web browser parallel to the presentation.