Instant Feedback Using Mobile Messaging Technologies

This paper introduces an open source instant feedback system using wireless messaging technologies. The system targets users' in-hand technologies and allows their participation in any feedback process through simply sending an SMS message or through a dedicated mobile application. Additionally, the system provides an advanced tool for authoring questions, visualizing results, viewing statistics and fully managing the feedback process. There are many contexts where instant feedback could be used. However, this paper focuses on its uses in education, and how it could be used to implement a mobile quizzing system through which students could answer short questions in lectures using SMS (or Bluetooth). The goal is to facilitate feedback by combining several approaches, to be able to enhance the learners' experiences. One can only aspire that by using this feedback system, the participation level of students would increase and perhaps the number of attendees would go up as well. Several evaluations were conducted in a university environment. Students have shown enthusiasm for using the system and participating in the feedback process. The participating lecturer was also able to get the feedback required; thus in the end it was a win-win situation for both lecturers and students.