An Experiment Using Doodle Polls

I love visiting classes and talking to students. It can often be daunting, especially when you're greeted with a sea of perplexed faces. Or even worse - bored faces! (I once gave a session to a group of Accountancy students where a someone fell asleep halfway through...) I usually only get to see a class once, at the beginning of the year, where I try my hardest to pimp the Library and the amazing services we offer. If I'm lucky I might get invited back by the Lecturer or Tutor to give another session on Harvard-Style Referencing, or a more in-depth session designed to help students prepare for a Graded Unit. Sometimes I also deliver sessions and workshops on using a particular resource - Westlaw for example.

When I first started delivering sessions my initial instinct was to try and cram in as much information as possible - because I knew I probably wasn't going to get a chance to follow up at a later date. I quickly learned that this route was a big mistake - students became overwhelmed with all the new ideas, resources, and processes they were being exposed to. I wish I had the opportunity to visit classes once a week, over a couple of weeks. This would give me the chance to introduce everything comprehensively, and over time. Such is life I suppose!

Recently I was asked to give a catch-up session to class and I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to try something a bit different. Two weeks before the session (the Lecturer involved is amazingly organised) I sent out an email to the students asking them to participate in a Doodle Poll to help me gauge which areas they wanted help with, and those that they already felt confident with. Some of the feedback I've received from other sessions has been along the lines of "but I knew about all of this already!" The last thing I want to do is waste students' time - especially when a lot of them feel time-poor at this time of year.

Doodle Polls are excellent for gathering informal feedback about an event. It took me all of three minutes to set-up and send out to the class. I asked for their preferences among the following;

• Help with defining your topic
• Help with refining your key terms and points
• Where to look for the right information
• How to search for the right information
• How to evaluate your findings
• How to save and collate your research
• Help with academic referencing
• Actually, I'm feeling pretty confident with all of the above (go you!)

Students were given the option to use their name, and to select multiple options. To avoid any complications arising from using the personal email addresses of students and a third party I sent to poll to myself first, and then used our internal mail system to forward to details on to the class.

I had my first response within minutes. Something which I admit left me feeling pretty positive! However, from a class of twelve I only received four responses in total. I also found that given the breadth of choices, the responses weren't so useful for preparing for the session. Of the eight options 'Where to look for the right information' and 'How to search for the right information' were the most popular items and I did find while giving the session, these where the areas that students needed help with the most. I'm glad that they were able to identify the research skills that were needing development!

I think that contacting the class has the potential to be useful for any other follow-up sessions, but this will be largely dependent on whether or not students reply. There's very little incentive with a Doodle Poll - so perhaps I can investigate alternatives in the near future.