Clicking away the distance from education

While distance education is becoming increasingly popular, it suffers from the problem of a lack of real-time interactivity between the instructor and the students, as well as an absence of peer interaction between students. A technique used in face-to-face classrooms to improve student-teacher interaction and promote peer discussion among students is the use of clickers, or student response systems. In this paper we describe the adaptation of clickers in distance education for a multiple classroom environment. We discuss the design and development of a distributed architecture for the implementation of a student response system for multiple remote classrooms. We report on a pilot implementation and discuss problems faced and solutions implemented.