The document discusses how a department at the University of Bath stumbled upon using an audience response system (EVS) to promote active learning in its social research courses. Small groups of students used EVS to develop survey questions and discuss them with their peers. This happy accident occurred when faculty interested in active learning met a learning technologist open to new ideas. The collaboration led the department to reconstruct how it approached pedagogy and engaged students in research skills like literature reviews and survey design.

1. The search for active learning: Lessons from a happy accident Department of Social & Policy Sciences Hedley Bashforth Nitin Parmar C-SAP e-Learning Forum Thursday 8 July 2010 http://opus.bath.ac.uk/18900/

7. Discussion of survey questions Appropriateness of wording Question approach Reducing ambiguity Reducing bias Department of Social & Policy Sciences

8. Different uses of EVS Department of Social & Policy Sciences

9. Different meanings of active learning Department of Social & Policy Sciences

10. “ We came to use EVS in the way we did because of the co-incidence of a number of factors: the institutional search for technologies that were seen to promote the kinds of active learning that might raise student survey satisfaction scores, the pedagogic search for new ways of teaching about old problems, but crucially the chance meeting between an Academic and a Learning Technologist outside the formal structures of institutional management. ” Department of Social & Policy Sciences

11. Contact Hedley Bashforth [email_address] Nitin Parmar [email_address] go.bath.ac.uk/nitin Department of Social & Policy Sciences