However, after adopting the Vevox platform institution wide, the University of North Dakota wanted to ensure their instructors were not only onboarded to the platform but were also aware of the raft of engagement options available to them from the get-go.
The solution... ‘Vevox week’!
The result: 185% increase in usage of live polls compared to the corresponding period last year!
Here’s what we got up to...
Getting started with Vevox
First up, we ran a session all about introducing Vevox to users for the very first time. I covered all the basics such as how to create your first polls, how to run and manage Q&A and how to access the all-important data at the end of your session.
With these sessions, I always look to leave plenty of time for Q&A at the end to address specific use cases and further help understanding. At the end, I like to leave people with a couple of bits of advice to get going:
1. Keep it simple
It can be tempting after watching a session covering word clouds, MCQs, ratings, rankings, quizzes, surveys, Q&A and more to feel that you have to include a lot of things to get started.
In my experience, the best use cases of Vevox use two or three features of the product and use them really well. Maybe it’s just a word cloud to break the ice at the beginning of the class, maybe it’s just a few polls dotted in amongst your teaching material that you then spend time discussing the answers with the class or perhaps it’s simply enabling students to ask questions anonymously through the Q&A platform to bring out the voices from people who may not typically raise their hand to ask a question.
2. Get stuck in!
Vevox is incredibly easy and intuitive to use. You can create a session and some polls and be ready to go in minutes!
Try it out! Get your phone out or pull in a couple of colleagues and test it out before using it in a real-world situation. You’ll very quickly see how easy it is to use!
Seamless integrations with PowerPoint and Blackboard
Another one of the sessions that I ran was in collaboration with Chad Bushy, one of the Instructional Technologists at The University of North Dakota. During the session, I introduced instructors to the Vevox PowerPoint add-in that allows you to add your polls directly into your presentation so that you can seamlessly present them alongside your existing presentation material for the class.
After this, Chad took the audience through how to add Vevox as an activity to their course within Blackboard, and how to set up the Gradebook pull to bring in correctness and/or participation scores from Vevox.
Vevox utilizes an LTI 1.3 to enable this deeper integration between the LMS system and polls and can be used with Canvas, Brightspace, and Moodle as well as Blackboard - which The University of North Dakota uses.
It was great to run this session alongside Chad, as he was able to run the demo directly from the institution's instance of Blackboard which is not always something I get to see.
Faculty Vevox showcase
The third day of 'Vevox Week' was probably my favorite of all (not least because I got to take a bit of a backseat and just listen for the most part!). In this session we had five faculty members from The University of North Dakota share their stories about the creative ways in which they currently use Vevox to foster participation and engagement.
The session was slightly less formal than the previous events, with audience members chipping in with their own ideas and posing questions to the speakers throughout.
What struck me most listening in was just how varied the use cases of Vevox were. Some of the speakers were using Vevox to boost and record attendance in classes, while others used it to informally test their student's understanding of subjects, allowing time to provide further support and instruction before more formal assessments. Some were using it for live classes, others to support asynchronous activities.
One of the things that three of the speakers all shared was that they had experience of using other polling solutions in the past but were drawn to using Vevox because there was no charge to the student. This is something I am really proud of with Vevox. We have a fair and transparent pricing model that only looks to charge the institution for the users who are actually using Vevox: The users are faculty and staff - NOT the students.
It’s amazing how many people light up in meetings and conversations when we say that.
Using Vevox beyond the classroom
On our final day, I was joined by my colleague Dermott Madden, Head of Sales & Customer Success here at Vevox - we shared practical use cases and tips for using Vevox outside of the classroom. Universities and educational institutions are more than just classrooms - they’re workplaces, conference venues, community spaces, and more - our customers use Vevox to support their work and engagement in these areas as well.
We were able to share how some of our corporate customers use Vevox to support internal communications meetings, ranging from the very large all-hands town halls to the more intimate departmental catchups.
What was nice about this session was not just that we were sharing stories from our other customers, but we were also able to share how we use Vevox internally. It’s always good to practice what you preach!
I also need to shout out my colleague Lewis Thompson, Technical Customer Success Manager here at Vevox who helped put together a lot of the content and data for this session ahead of time.
The impact of our sessions
Just before I started writing this, I was reviewing the Vevox usage stats for The University of North Dakota, and I was very pleased to see that in the 3 weeks after we ran the sessions:
- There were 77 new users within the institution’s account
- 174 Vevox sessions had been run. This compares to 37 in the same time period a year ago
- 829 polls had been run which is 185% more than were run last year
Madison Torgeson, IT Project Manager at the University of North Dakota, commented on the impact ‘Vevox week’ had:
”Our goal with Vevox week was to offer our staff and faculty different solutions and showcase Vevox’s capabilities to help solve some of their challenges, whether it be in the classroom or out. Creating a week dedicated to this solution allowed our staff and faculty the opportunity to learn what they wanted to in a shorter period so that it stayed fresh in their minds.”
