A social poll is a question followed by a graph that shows how others answered. It's a unique way to enhance the learning experience by adding weight to questions, encouraging deeper reflection, and creating a sense of community between learners.
This article provides a few examples of how you might use a social poll in your elearning.
For information about how to create a social poll in your elearning course, see Setting up a social poll.
Contents
Examples
Here we demonstrate some common use cases for adding social polls to your elearning.
1. Add weight to a myth-buster question and show learners they're not alone
Social polls are a great way to build engagement at the start of a course. A myth-buster and social polling graph combo is a 'hook' you can add upfront in a module to draw learners in and make them curious about the content.
This performance improvement module demonstrates this approach by opening with a thought-provoking question.
After making their decision learners see a graph that demonstrates how their choice compared to their peers, along with an explanation of the correct answer.
Adding this kind of social interaction to a question creates real impact and a sense of shared experience between learners. It also exposes common misconceptions and shows the learner that many others may have misconceptions about the subject as well.
This example also combines social polling with Clips to play back the learner's chosen answer and reinforce how many peers thought the same as them. Find out more about how to make the most of Clips in Using text input clips.
2. Reflect on questions that don't have a right or wrong answer
Social polls don't just add impact to factual questions. The social nature of the feature lends itself well to questions that explore grey areas, for example in soft skills modules.
This ethics training module uses polling questions with live data to simulate a debate about economics. The learner listens to opposing viewpoints before being asked to decide which view they agree with.
A graph and Clip follow this, playing back the learner's opinion and showing how many others agreed with their view.
This is an attention-grabbing, visual way of exposing the wide variety of views on a subject - and creates greater impact than simply stating there are multiple opinions out there.
3. Compare how views have changed
Another great use of social polling is to expose how views change before and after working through an elearning module.
In this scenario-based module, learners are shown a short scenario and asked to judge whether or not a person is guilty.
The learner then dives deeper into the scenario, exploring the cases for and against each piece of evidence.
Now the learner has more information about the scenario, they're asked whether or not they've changed their mind since they first judged the character.
Now the learner discovers what happened in the case. This is followed by a social poll comparison that highlights how the learner's initial and final verdicts compared to the rest of the general public's, and how that has changed since viewing more evidence. Clips are also used to emphasize this change.
Comparisons like this create powerful moments of reflection, exposing how viewpoints can change and differ based on multiple factors. It's a great way to highlight a subject's importance as it demonstrates how the learning content has changed opinions on a large scale.
Using social polls with scored questions
In some cases, you might decide to build a course that uses social polling for engagement upfront as well as including a scored test at the end.
This flow is great for creating an interactive and engaging experience. To ensure your course is set up correctly, set the social polling question at the start of your course to have a score weighting of 0. This ensures that the engagement question doesn't contribute a score in addition to the scored questions in the final test, which could otherwise lead to an inaccurate final result.