How higher ed faculty are boosting student engagement!

As Kahoot! was born in higher ed, our first EDU Meetup last week was a long-awaited and highly anticipated return to our roots! We saw presentations from higher ed faculty and admins sharing their recommended best practices for using Kahoot! in your courses. They detail their first-hand experience reviewing course content, assessing knowledge, and fostering discussion with Kahoot!. So, with exam season right around the corner, there’s no better time to get up to date on our latest features and updates to try out with your students!

In case you missed it or want to revisit any of your favorite sessions and rewatch on-demand!

Don’t forget to take advantage of our special EDU Meetup offer to get up to 20% off on Kahoot!+ plans from $12.99/month, or if you’re already on a Kahoot! EDU Standard plan, email schoolpack@kahoot.com for a free upgrade to Kahoot! EDU Pro. 

What’s new at Kahoot! for Higher ed

For our 10th anniversary of making learning awesome, Sean D’Arcy, VP of Kahoot! at School, highlighted how far we’ve come since our humble beginnings as a university project. Attendees got a look at higher ed faculty favorites, including word cloud, open-ended, and brainstorm question types, as well as our newest question types, drop pin, slider, and 6 answer options for quizzes and polls! And that was only the beginning! We’re excited to introduce so many new ways of creating interactive learning experiences with Student Passes, giving students access to the Kahoot! Creator, and engaging study modes, encouraging student knowledge sharing in and out of the classroom. Plus student-led game modes, and Kahoot! courses that allow instructors to add multiple kahoots, videos, PDFs, and other resources into full courses that can be hosted live, assigned to students, or studied at their own pace. 

Our most recent project, Kahoot! for Brands was also announced, making it possible for faculty and admins to add their higher ed institutions’ unique branding into all kahoots hosted on campus! We’re so thankful for the constant support from the higher ed community over the past 10 years with over 97% of the global top 500 universities using Kahoot!, and over 82% of those with upgraded Kahoot! EDU or Kahoot!+ accounts. That’s a lot of awesome learning happening around the world!

Kick up the engagement with kahoots

As a Professor of Education at McKendree University, Dr. Julie Tronsing-Meyer’s students are future teachers learning about how to effectively teach lesson content. Dr. Tronsing-Meyer discusses her research-based teaching practices and how ISTE standards and the constructivist teaching theory support the use of Kahoot! for effective learning. In practice with her undergraduate students, she found that using Kahoot! was a great way to support active learning because her students learn through experience, social discourse, and collaboration. Finally, Julie gives us her tips and tricks for using Kahoot! in her courses and shares feedback from her students, who said, “Kahoot! makes me feel confident to participate in the activity”.

From student to teacher – using Kahoot! in all academic arenas

Kurt Naicker is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Accounting at North West University and the Campus Innovation Lead within the Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences. Kurt talked us through his experiences using Kahoot! not only as an instructor but also as a student himself! He discusses how Kahoot! aided in his professional growth and how he brought his learnings with him as a faculty leader, helping to implement technology and exploring how to keep curriculum relevant in the future of AI, machine learning, and the fourth industrial revolution. Kurt shared from his own experience and the opinion of his students, that there was an observable improvement in their achievement and performance as Kahoot! increased knowledge retention, collaboration, and helped them take a more structured approach to assessment.

Make the most of Kahoot! tools for interactive learning and assessment

This is a session you won’t want to miss! Joshua Scoggin, Account Executive at Kahoot!, shows you how to take any Kahoot! from good to great, optimize the Kahoot! experience for assessment, and gives an in-depth demonstration of Kahoot! Creator, question types, and options. Whether you’re new to Kahoot! or a seasoned Kahoot!er, there is something here for everyone from the foundations of how to choose the right question types for your content to how you can create a plan and organize your information so your students can get the most out of the Kahoot! experience!

Uncommon Kahoot!s – Have you ever…?

Dr. Jennifer Robinette, Senior Professional Lecturer of Communication and Public Relations at Marist College, challenges the audience to teach entire, hour-long lectures with Kahoot! as an end-to-end interactive presentation tool. With recommended structures for how Kahoot! can complement the flipped classroom approach, Dr. Robinette discusses the value of incorporating Kahoot! questions throughout classroom content, encouraging students to constantly apply themselves by including PowerPoint slides and videos interwoven with polls, word clouds, and puzzles that optimize lessons for student attention spans. To really lock in the learning, Jennifer creates lightning rounds to repeat any difficult questions that came up in the lesson with less time to answer and worth more points! Now that’s a recipe for engaging learning that her students loved so much, they even shared the experience on social media!

Thank you for making this event awesome!

Thank you to everyone who participated in our first Kahoot! EDU Meetup for higher ed, and to our speakers who made this event truly awesome with all their insights and advice for improving the learning experience for every student! Don’t forget to re-watch your favorite sessions and take advantage of our EDU Meetup offer to get access to all these great features and save up to 20% on a Kahoot!+ plan from $12.99/month!

If you have any content from the event or your own classrooms that you would like to share, please reach out or tag us on  Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok! We hope you have a great rest of the term and we’ll see you again soon for the EDU Summit in June!