Peer Instruction for very large groups

Colleagues from the University of Paderborn have developed a free-to-use prototypical web-based classroom response system at the that they want to offer you for applications in teaching and research. The system is called PINGO („Peer Instruction for very large groups“).

Similar to the ask-the-audience life-line in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, students can be involved in the lecture by answering (conceptual) questions posed by the instructor using their Internet-enabled devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops etc.). PINGO may be used to implement constructivist teaching designs, such as Peer Instruction, Classwide discusions, Three-Questions Sequence approach and many others. The team is working on extending PINGO (e.g., in terms of question formats) and they want to use it also as an artifact to conduct experiments in the area of teaching and technology use. If you are interested in joining them, please do not hesitate to contact them. Moreover, the team plans to offer PINGO as open source in fall 2013.

PINGO is currently offered in an English and a German version (Spanish will follow soon). PINGO is offered as a hosted service free of charge to universities world wide.

A virtual tour that illustrates the features and how to use PINGO is available here.

To register as instructor, please follow this link.

The project website can be accessed here. There, the project team also offers some instructional videos on peer instruction and the use of PINGO.