»Any questions?«

Auditorium

Talks, lectures and since Corona also online seminars usually end with: »Any questions?«. And always nobody answers or the same ones always ask the questions. Hardly anyone in the lecture hall dares to answer, or the questions that one actually wanted to ask during the course of the lecture are forgotten. In the video conferencing system, you are not anonymous. The session may be recorded. The microphones are muted. The chat quickly becomes confusing; the teacher can hardly follow the comments and questions.

If you want your lectures and online seminars to be reflected upon, you need a tool that allows you to ask questions anonymously and silently. Such an open source tool is available free of charge with »frag.jetzt«. Are there any concerns? Is the tool accessible, data protection compliant, immediately usable with any end device without training and without technical understanding? Three times yes.

If I let »frag.jetzt« be used anonymously and thus without social control, do I not invite abuse? No, because the question list can be moderated live by an assistant: Only questions appropriate to the lecture remain on the list. In addition, you can automatically move all new questions to the moderator: They only become public when you or your moderator release them individually.

But I cannot answer all questions in the last ten minutes of my lecture or in the online seminar. Sure. This is where the collective tool aspect comes into play: everyone in the audience can rate each question, in other words, vote up or down. You can answer the questions rated highest by the audience immediately, the others, if you wish, later in »frag.jetzt« or in the course forum of the learning platform. You can also use the tool before the meeting, to collect questions from the participants and make them available to each other for weighting. This involves the participants even before the meeting, allows you to ask for expectations and previous knowledge and helps you to adapt your presentation or seminar accordingly.

What's so special about »frag.jetzt«?

What makes our backchannel tool different from »Mentimeter«, »Slido«, »Poll Everywhere« and many other commercial feedback apps? It's the result of many years of experience with audience response systems in classroom and online teaching. Besides an intuitive usability, proven in empirical UX studies with hundreds of students, didactic and motivational criteria were decisive for the conception and development of the app, see our ARSnova blog Opens new page:

Awarding a bonus for questions

The teacher can award bonus points for good questions. Awarded questions receive a star and the student finds an 8-digit number code (»token«) for each star on the session account. The tokens can be redeemed for bonus points by sending an e-mail to the teacher.

Answering questions

Teachers and moderators can affirm, deny and comment on questions or mark them as discussed. Of course, the symbols can also be used for other labelling purposes. They also serve as filter criteria to quickly find marked questions. That students cannot comment on questions is intentional: »frag.jetzt« should not be Facebook or Twitter. If we allowed it, the students would only be busy commenting on their fellow students' questions.

Categorizing questions

The session creator can define categories (tags) for questions. The question poser can assign his or her question to one of the predefined categories. Categorized questions can be filtered by clicking on the tag. For example, tagging allows the moderator of a panel discussion to filter questions from the audience by topic or addressee: tag »Question to Mr. Biden«, tag »Question to Mr. Trump« …

Analyzing questions with AI support

Using NLP (Natural Language Processing), all questions are grammatically analyzed. The recognized nouns are brought into their basic form (lemmatized) and suggested to the questioner as keywords. We use the NLP software »spaCy« Opens new page . A word cloud can be created from the analyzed keywords or the keywords you have assigned yourself, called a topic cloud in »frag.jetzt«. It visualizes the frequency of the keywords: The larger the font, the more questions refer to the keyword. The rating of the questions is also included in the font size. The topic cloud also serves as a navigator to all questions of a selected keyword: Clicking on a word in the cloud takes you to the questions with that keyword.

Presenting questions in a focused way

For the discussion of the questions on the beamer, they can be presented individually in full view. To move on to the next question, simply press the space bar. You can also activate the display in "kiosk mode": Then, incoming new questions are automatically shown in full view. Switching to the next question is delayed to allow reading. On the question list, constantly new questions or ratings can make reading and presenting difficult, as the positions of the questions change. With the pause icon the question stream can be frozen. However, new questions or ratings are still possible. If the presenter clicks on a question in the question list, it appears in full view. At the same time, the question flashes on the end devices of all participants to attract their attention.

Search, sort and filter questions

The quick location of specific questions is made possible by search, sort and filter options. The full text search also includes the answers. Sorting is possible by time and rating. The following filter criteria can be selected: Bonus-awarded, answered, discussed, affirmed, negated and own questions. By clicking on the tag icon of a question, all questions of this category are displayed. By clicking on the user icon of a question, all questions of this user will be displayed. This allows you to assess the distribution of questions among the question posers: How many people participate? Which questions does one and the same person ask?

Free of charge with full functionality

Any number of sessions can be created free of charge as a guest or registered user. Only the sessions of registered users remain permanently. Only 180 days after the last use of a session it will be deleted automatically.

Accessible

In »frag.jetzt« the use cases are read aloud by an audio guide and can be navigated with the numeric keys. This allows you to use the app comfortably and quickly without having to explore the entire page with the screen reader first. The user interface meets the readability requirements of WCAG 2.1 AA. Appropriate display options are available for projector presentations and for visually impaired persons. In particular, the font size of the questions can be scaled as needed. Besides the room code, a session can also be entered directly via an automatically generated link (clipboard icon on the session page).

Data protection

»frag.jetzt« can be used completely anonymously when registering as a guest. The accounts of registered users are stored and managed in accordance with the data protection regulations of the DSGVO. The program code is »Open Source Software« and can be viewed on GitHub. »frag.jetzt« is operated as free »Software as a Service« by TransMIT GmbH, see imprint. If you want to run »frag.now« on your own server, you will find a Docker installation guide on GitHub Opens new window or you can commission TransMit GmbH with it.

»Progressive Web App« (PWA)

Although an ordinary Web page, it behaves like an app from the app store. You can install it from within the browser without downloading: »Add to Home Page«. After that it will start like an ordinary app. As a PWA, it runs on any smartphone, no matter what operating system, no matter what browser. So your audience will always be ready to use »frag.jetzt« on their mobile devices.

Free Software and without advertising

Since winter semester 2019/20 »frag.jetzt« is an open source project of the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen, THM. The website is manufacturer-neutral and free of advertising. Further development is guaranteed for the next five years. Then the project manager will retire and will run the project as a hobby. But until then, hundreds of computer science students of THM will be engaged and continuously working on all aspects of software development (user experience, high availability and security) —not for money, but for credit points and good grades.

Activate students online

Anyone who has held online seminars in a video conferencing system for 90 minutes knows what it means to speak against a »digital wall«: Talking without feedback with a tendency to talking to yourself. Whether the participants really listen, understand what they are hearing or are even present at all cannot be seen. Their cameras are switched off. Malte Persike explains how students can be activated with back-channel tools like »frag.jetzt« in spite of the wall:

Mobile phone use in the lecture hall

The use of the smartphone during the lecture naturally entails a high risk of distraction. We have learned from our many years of experience with audience response systems in lecture halls, how to didactically approach the risk of distraction:

  1. Mobile phone use during the lecture:

    An assistant moderates the question list on site or from a distance. 10 minutes before the end of the lecture, the teacher answers 2-3 top questions on the beamer.

    What if I don't have an assistant available? Follow Malte Persike's advice from the video above: Ask someone from the front row to take over this job. She or he won't say no.

  2. Mobile phone use only during the break:

    The teacher announces the room code during the break and moderates the questions himself. After the break she answers 2-3 top questions.

  3. No mobile phone use during the lecture:

    The teacher creates a new session at the end of each lecture. Students can ask and rate questions at home. The question list is moderated by an assistant or the teacher himself. In the first 10 minutes of the next lecture the teacher answers 2-3 top questions.

  4. No mobile phone use during the lecture:

    The teacher creates a session for the entire duration of the course. An assistant moderates the question list during the semester. The teacher marks the relevant questions and deletes all others. The question list thus serves to reflect on the lecture contents and to prepare for the exam.

Screen Readers

Based on our own tests with blind people we recommend the following screen readers for the use of »frag.jetzt«:

Windows computer: NVDAopens new page
Linux computer: ChromeVox Opens new page
macOS computer: VoiceOver Opens new page