Clarissa's Blog

Some (actually very few) professors at my school use the so-called “clickers”, little gadgets that allow to poll students in class. Students use them to do a sort of a multiple-choice thing where everybody will see aggregate results on the screen. The gadget is completely unnecessary because you can do all it does and more through cell phones and the web. I did it once for fun and avoided the use of stupid clickers. Besides, there is no way on the planet learning is enhanced by this sort of polling in any significant way.

Turning Technologies, the company that provides clickers to our university, has figured out that their gadget has been rendered obsolete. So what does it do? It is now trying to get us to FORCE our students into purchasing a MULTI-YEAR license where students will have to PAY irrespective of whether they even take courses where clickers are used. We don;t even ask students to buy textbooks because we know it will be a hardship for them. But we’ve got to force them to buy a LICENSE, which is a permission to use and not even an actual device they can then keep??

As you know, our students are not rich. They all work, they all have family obligations, and they all struggle financially. The gall of vicious and stupid Turning Technologies that tries to exploit students and saddle them with a completely unnecessary fee out of pure unadulterated greed is shocking.

Of course, I have volunteered for a committee that will decide whether to get sucked into Turning Technologies’ scam of the year. Of course, I will fight with everything I’ve got to make sure this extra cost doesn’t get inflicted on our students. Many schools, however, will be happy to adopt Turning Technologies’ suggestion that instead of a college paying a fee to use clickers, the cost should be passed on to unsuspecting and unwilling students.

@TurningTechCan : your TurningPoint Cloud sucks, you suck, and I will do everything in my power to spread the news of your scamming, greedy practices as far and wide as I can. You are an absolute disgrace.