Using Mentimeter for greater student participation in online teaching and assessment

A staff and student perspective on how the Division of Psychiatry have used the interactive presentation software to encourage participation in live, online sessions, and its impact on assessment.

About Mentimeter

Mentimeter is an easy-to-use, interactive presentation software used live in lectures, seminars or any face to face or online teaching session. It also works well as a tool to be used asynchronously to, for example, ‘temperature check’ a current issue; act as a diagnostic of prior knowledge or check understanding after a taught session. 

Mentimeter enables you to create polls, open and closed questions or even competitive quizzes, as well as providing a mechanism for students to pose questions or feed back to academic staff.  

Encouraging participation in online lectures and assessment

In this video, Dr Martin Compton (Arena Centre) interviews Dr Ellie Pearce (Research Fellow in Division of Psychiatry) about how Mentimeter was used alongside Zoom breakout rooms to encourage participation and offer a shared focal point in live, online sessions as part of the response to campus closures in 2020-21.

A student on the MSc Clinical Mental Health Sciences, Fiona Lin, then goes on to describe how she and her peers responded to the Mentimeter use and how they then began using it as part of an assessment activity called ‘Journal Club’.

Dr. Pearce concludes by explaining how, in turn, the teaching team were inspired by the students' use of Mentimeter, to use the software in a similar way.

Also of note are Fiona’s responses to questions about gamified elements and the possibility of Mentimeter ‘saturation’: 

I don't think there's any shame in having fun and enjoying learning in whatever capacity. I think the main thing is if it helps you to remember something or it helps you learn something, then it's doing its job and you had an enjoyable time so it's a win, win. -  Fiona Lin, MSc Clinical Mental Health Sciences student.

MediaCentral Widget Placeholderhttps://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Player/Eac0838g

Jump to a specific section: 

• Chapter 1: Context and cohorts 
• Chapter 2: Mentimeter and Zoom use for live, online teaching
• Chapter 3: Benefits of using Mentimeter
• Chapter 4: Student perspective on how Mentimeter was used in taught sessions
• Chapter 5: Student use of Mentimeter for ‘Journal Club’
• Chapter 6: Hidden benefits of using Mentimeter
• Chapter 7: Challenging preconceptions
• Chapter 8: Benefits of familiarity
• Chapter 9: How student use inspired MSc programme leader

Using Mentimeter at UCL

There are advance features available such as PowerPoint-upload, remote clicker (‘Mentimote’) and data exports. The UCL licence gives full access to the software for all staff and students via their UCL log in. Participants in polls, quizzes and interactive presentations need only go to menti.com and enter a code given by the presentation author.

To use Mentimeter in your teaching or assessment, visit the single sign-on page for an authoring account. You can find full guidance on the UCL Mentimeter resource centre.   

For technical advice on how to use Mentimeter, speak to your faculty learning technologists or contact the Digital Education team.

To discuss the principles and processes of peer assessment and timely feedback turnaround, contact the Arena Centre.