Survey Says: CEE Poll a Great Primer for Student Engagement Online

Are you looking for a polling tool that allows students to see the class poll results after they submit their response? Polls can be used promote student engagement or provide insights into student learning.

"CEE Poll has been an easy, accessible way to improve engagement in lecture sessions. Students earn participation marks for responding to the in-class discussion questions, and these grades are automatically entered into the Canvas Gradebook. It's a great way to check in with students during class." Leanne Ramer, Senior Lecturer, Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology

Created by LTT programmer Jake Wang, CEE Poll is a quick and easy to use tool developed specifically to meet the needs of SFU instructors in online and blended courses within Canvas, without going to an external polling tool such as Menti or Poll Everywhere.

The CEE Poll tool is flexible. Poll questions can be housed within different pages and tools in Canvas. For example, polls can be embedded in discussions, quizzes, announcements, or content pages. CEE poll can capture student participation automatically in the Gradebook, if the Poll tool is incorporated in an Assignment using the ‘External Tool’ submission type.

How does it work?

1. Instructors upload a question related to a course concept in the CEE Poll Question field, then identify different answer options for students to select. Poll questions can be text-based or they can include an image as the question prompt.
2. Poll questions can be embedded within in discussions, quizzes, or announcements in Canvas, or they can be housed on content pages. Polls are easy to add by accessing the CEE Poll tool when editing in Canvas.
3. To capture student participation automatically in the Gradebook for courses that allocate participation points, connect CEE Poll tool to the Gradebook, by incorporating it into an Assignment using the ‘External Tool’ submission type. Be sure to set a time limit duration for the poll if it is used as an assignment.

How do instructors use Polls in Social Science Courses?

Below is an example of how a CEE Poll was used in Dr.Evan Tiffany’s Philosophy 329 Moral Luck in Criminal Law course:

In the example above, the student responses are split between two possible answers. The instructor can use these responses as the starting point for a discussion where students can provide further details about the rationale for their response, or work in groups to compare their rationale with those of other students.

Poll results can also serve as a starting point for a deeper discussion of a concept or to assess whether students are struggling with particular concepts.

How do instructors use Polls in STEM courses?

Another example from a large enrollment course (BPK 110) includes a set of poll questions that are available during the lectures. The polls provide an immediate sense of how well students are grasping the concepts.

In this scenario, the poll is linked to the Assignment tool in Canvas and it automatically captures students’ responses as complete/incomplete in the Gradebook as a portion of the allocated participation points in the course. The other, non-graded polls are grouped on a separate Canvas page within the course.

Here is a sample of Dr. Leanne Ramer’s use of CEE Poll in an Assignment for BPK 100: