Choosing the Appropriate Audience Response System in Different Use Cases

Education in schools and universities suffers from different problems like the lack of interaction between the lecturer and the students as well as the fear of asking irrelevant questions or providing wrong answers in front of a large audience. A lot of systems exist that try to solve these issues by means of technical tools; e.g., audience response systems. Each of these individual systems supports different functional scopes with different didactic purposes in order to support specific use cases. For the lecturer, it is very hard to choose an appropriate system. Besides the functional scope, there are a lot of predefined limitations, such as a given room with technical restrictions or a favorite operating system and presentation software to present the slides. This paper gives an overview of fifty existing systems (with varying degree of detail) and proposes a filter mechanism based on the index card metaphor to select appropriate systems depending on their individual limitations. In order to simplify this selection process for the lecturer, the filter mechanism is implemented in a web-based selection tool.