Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


Cal State Long Beach Pushes iClicker for Student Response

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 05/27/09

Starting this fall, California State University, Long Beach will roll out iClicker as its preferred student response system. Clickers were already popular at Cal State Long Beach, and the student senate, representing 38,000 students, voted to encourage faculty to incorporate iClicker in the instruction, mostly because they liked the instant feedback.

"Simplicity and reliability were central to our faculty's decision to standardize with iClickers," said Leslie Kennedy, director, instructional technology support services. "We all liked that iClicker's response system was about minimizing the technology and keeping students focused instead on the course material."

Instructors use clickers as a tool to gauge students' understanding and to deliver quizzes. Students use a wireless handheld device that allows them to vote for an answer by clicking on the appropriate button. An instructor "receiver" plugged into the faculty computer collects the votes from the student clickers and displays the voting results in a graph to the audience. At Long Beach instructors can integrate clicker results with BeachBoard, the university's course management system.

The initial demand for clicker standardization at Cal State Long Beach came from students who found themselves required to buy multiple devices. Associated Students Inc. (ASI) met with Paul Boyd-Batstone, chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee on Technology (FACT), asking for help. Boyd-Batstone drafted an Academic Senate resolution after attending clicker demonstrations, surveying faculty, and researching how other universities standardized. Cost, reliability, ease of use, and accessibility were primary selection criteria.

Other institutions of higher education using iClicker include California State University, Fresno, the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, and the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • circuit patterns

    Anthropic Launches Lower-Cost Claude Sonnet 5

    Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 5, positioning the model as its most autonomous mid-tier offering to date and a lower-cost alternative to its flagship Opus 4.8 system. The company said the model can plan multi-step tasks, operate tools such as browsers and terminals, and complete agentic work at a level that previously required larger and more expensive models.

  • laptop displaying a red padlock icon sits on a wooden desk with a digital network interface background

    Malware Turns Microsoft 365 Calendar Into Covert Attack Vector

    Security researchers at Group-IB have uncovered a Windows malware strain that turns Microsoft 365 calendars into covert channels for receiving commands and stealing files from targeted organizations.

  • artificial intelligence on laptop

    OpenAI to Combine AI Products into Desktop 'Superapp'

    OpenAI is reportedly developing a desktop application that would combine several of its emerging AI products into a single platform, according to reports, marking the latest step in the company's effort to transform ChatGPT from a standalone chatbot into a broader productivity and automation environment.

  • abstract malware attack

    Report: AI Ransomware Can Now Run Much of an Attack Without Human Help

    Ransomware attacks are becoming more automated, and AI could take that much further, according to global cybersecurity company NCC Group's July 2026 threat intelligence report.