STUDENTS who 鈥渢weet鈥� during class might not be ignoring the lecturers鈥� untold wisdom 鈥� they might be assessing the quality of the teaching. The micro-blogging website Twitter turns out to be a useful, hassle-free way for academic institutions to gather course data as a term progresses.
Stefan Stieger and Christoph Burger at the University of Vienna in Austria wondered whether there was a better way to assess teaching quality than end-of-term polls. So they recruited 26 students and polled their views weekly via tweets, marking the course on a scale of 1 to 9.
The immediacy of the poll provided fresh insight into the quality of teaching, without the heavy administrative effort normally needed to collate the data (CyberPsychology & Behavior, ).
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