A few weeks back, the Xorro team released heatmap visualisation for Xorro-Q‘s hotspot questions. This enables a much clearer interpretation of the many thousands of data points contributed by an audience to a live hot spot question.
In August a University of Auckland lecturer collaborated with us using Xorro-Q in large classes. Students were required to respond to multi-select hotspot questions to demonstrate their understanding of how a structure would deflect under given loads.
Using Instant Hotspot Questions in class
In class, a Xorro-Q hotspot question can be asked “instantly” by simply drag-selecting over an image on the display (eg in a slide show). The students receive this image as a “hotspot”on their phone, tablet or laptop displays. They touch or click on the image multiple times to input dots and lines. These inputs can be auto-assessed and individualised feedback is provided instantly. The aggregated responses are displayed graphically for the lecturer in real-time, either as raw data points superimposed on the source question image, or (now) as a heat map displaying the density of inputs of different types (eg auto-assessed right or wrong).
How heatmap visualisation helps
Very large audiences or workgroups can easily produce many thousands or tens of thousands of data points. Plotting these in real-time can produce a cluttered output which takes some effort to interpret; effort which can be ill-afforded in a live audience setting. The use of heatmap visualisation makes it far easier for a presenter (or in this case, lecturer) to identify the common misconceptions at a glance and act on these immediately.
Heatmap visualisation is already available on all of Xorro-Q’s hotspot question results. The visualisation algorithm will continue to be improved over the next few weeks to provide a more granular and detailed view of the underlying data.
