Miami Dade College, located in Miami, Florida, is one of the largest degree-granting institutions in the United States. Across eight campuses and multiple outreach centers, Miami Dade currently serves over 165,000 students. It is also proudly declared to be among the most diverse institutions in the U.S. with 167 nations and 63 languages represented in the Miami Dade College student body.

How does a higher education institution, especially one of this size, support all faculty members to engage their students with digital learning solutions? For Miami Dade College, Kahoot! EDU proved to be a logical choice, and their collaboration with Kahoot! has since continued to grow.

A student engagement solution for all learning environments

Kahoot! has had a presence at MDC for years. Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hanadi Saleh had started seeing it used around the college, such as in orientation sessions to connect with an audience of new students.

When the pandemic hit and classes switched to remote learning, the faculty knew they needed tools that would keep students motivated to learn in a remote setting. Many educators at the college took the initiative to create free Kahoot! accounts to support their teaching, and when Hanadi saw that faculty members were finding real value in these solutions, she took action to take the college’s Kahoot! experience to the next level.

“I reached out to our associate provost for academic learning and technologies, and he purchased the college-wide license,” Hanadi said. “Once it was official, we started doing training and promoting it.”

Educating the educators to maximize the value of their Kahoot! license

This opened a new chapter in MDC’s use of Kahoot!. The college’s Center for Institutional and Organizational Learning (CIOL) not only supported the roll-out of hundreds of Kahoot! EDU licenses for faculty members, but connected with faculty to ensure that they could reap the full benefits of their new license. 

“This was the trigger for us to start offering training and support for Kahoot!,” Hanadi said. “Then the communication started with the Kahoot! Customer Success team to make it more official and to offer training, and we took it from there.”

By purchasing Kahoot! at the institutional level MDC was able to build a partnership with Kahoot! to support the work of the CIOL. Hanadi and other CIOL staff members worked closely with their Customer Success Manager at Kahoot! to create accessible training resources that would help faculty master teaching with Kahoot!, including taking advantage of Kahoot!’s new features.  The CIOL hosts both webinars and in-person workshops, all interactive learning sessions focused on two topics: pedagogy and technology.

With these training sessions, the CIOL introduced faculty to the many different ways they could use Kahoot! in their teaching practice, and how using Kahoot! can drive stronger learning outcomes for their students. The Kahoot! Customer Success team also helped to convert the CIOL’s workshops to digital on-demand resources that are now available 24/7 to MDC faculty.

The Kahoot! team even joined MDC’s annual Conference Day to host presentations for hundreds of faculty members, administrators, and staff, all about what Kahoot! EDU can do for them in their unique roles.

Simplifying EdTech with high-impact digital solutions

This in-depth training approach is also designed to keep faculty focused on the digital solutions that will give them the greatest value. “We used to introduce many new free EdTech tools to faculty, and many would get phased out. Now, we’re more selective. When we’re deciding whether to use a tool, we look at the support.” 

Hanadi continued, “We don’t want to introduce faculty to tools that do the same thing. It’s confusing and overwhelming the cognitive load for faculty. Then it will defeat the purpose of introducing the student engagement concept. So let’s focus on one tool and see the impact, see the results, the student engagement level, and then measure it from there.”

What did faculty members have to say during and after the training sessions about using Kahoot! in their classes?