Using an online student response system, Socrative, to facilitate active learning of Physiology by first year graduate entry to medicine students: a feasibility study

Technologies such as audience response units (‘clickers’) have been used to facilitate greater student engagement within a variety of educational settings, but numerous technical issues have limited their more widespread use. More recently, flexible, cloud-based student response systems (SRSs), which are designed for use with student mobile devices and overcome most of the limitations of clicker systems, have become widely available. However, the suitability of use for such systems in accelerated degree programmes such as graduate entry to medicine (GEM) has yet to be assessed. Therefore, we utilised Socrative, a freely available SRS, in a physiology component of a first year GEM module to ascertain, a) its ease of deployment, b) its popularity with students and, c) if they felt it improved their learning. There were no technical problems using Socrative. Further, 93% of respondents to an attitudinal survey strongly agreed or agreed that they favoured using Socrative in the classroom, and that they felt that it had improved their learning (92%). Thus, our data strongly indicate that the use of SRSs like Socrative would be highly valued even by the time-pressured, relatively mature students enrolled on accelerated professional courses such as GEM.