The Higher Colleges of Technology is the largest state-funded higher education institution in the United Arab Emirates. With 16 campuses across the country, HCT has around 21,000 students and 1,100+ full-time faculty.

Implementing Kahoot! in faculty trainings

In 2019, Higher College of Technology successfully connected and onboarded teachers across 16 campuses into Kahoot!. Since onboarding, Kahoot! has become a beloved tool amongst faculty, staff, and students. As new features and tools have been released over the years, HCT has not only adopted these features but trained faculty on how to leverage them through their Teaching with Technology team.

Sarah Whitaker is the Senior Manager of the Teaching with Technology (TWT) team, responsible for providing faculty with professional development on how to effectively integrate educational technology in the classroom.

The Teaching with Technology (TWT) team at HCT trains faculty on how to effectively integrate educational technology in the classroom. Over the years, the TWT team has utilized Kahoot! to enhance professional development courses and faculty trainings by making them more engaging. The team has discovered that by giving instructors the opportunity to experience Kahoot! from a learner’s perspective, they are able to better understand how to best incorporate Kahoot! into lectures to give their students the best experience. 

“The faculty can get really excited to be in the kahoot. It’s always a pleasure to see how much fun teachers can have playing Kahoot!” agreed Samantha McDonalad Amara, Senior Specialist for Teaching with Technology (TWT) at Higher Colleges of Technology

Introducing AI features to the Kahoot! experience

Within the past year, Kahoot! released the AI Question generator and the AI PDF-to-kahoot generator, features that have been widely accepted by the HCT team.

HCT is committed to their mission of providing students with resources that support learning in and out of the classroom. The institution currently offers six courses on using AI in the classroom. The introduction of AI to Kahoot! serves as an exciting resource for HCT faculty and students to further develop the skill set and understanding of AI.

“Knowing how to use AI to our advantage is a skill we will need to develop,” Samantha said. “It’s really exciting to incorporate the use and learning of AI into a tool we already love and use a lot.”

How Kahoot! makes creating content easier for faculty

It’s no secret that the list of responsibilities for professors extends far beyond the classroom. When they aren’t in lectures, professors are creating content, grading, identifying knowledge gaps to better advise students, and much more. 

“When we bring in new technology tools, faculty are initially excited, but then it becomes one more thing to learn how to use,” Samantha said. “The new AI tools encourage faculty to use and keep using Kahoot!” 

The introduction of new technology tools excites HCT faculty but the reality is that each tool requires instructors to spend time learning how to use it, adding to the to-do list. The simple user interface of Kahoot! paired with time-saving tools like the PDF-to-kahoot generator, AI question generator, Import Slides option, and more have allowed for an easy, quick, and seamless integration amongst HCT professors.

What HCT loves about Kahoot!

As the HCT faculty has implemented Kahoot! into lectures over the years, they have experienced the fun of Kahoot! firsthand as learners in faculty training and as host in the classroom. While the platform has developed and new features have been added, the professors’ usage of Kahoot! has increased. What started out as simple, multiple choice quizzes at the end of class has evolved into more advanced usage. Today, the faculty use Kahoot! to introduce concepts, review and assess knowledge, as well as to motivate students to participate in class. Professors have also discovered the benefits of importing presentations into Kahoot! to create interactive lessons that keep students engaged throughout lectures.

“The ability to embed presentation slides in between Kahoot! questions makes it a more well rounded tool for teachers to use throughout an entire lesson rather than just having a Kahoot! at the end,” Samantha said.

The benefits of Kahoot! extend beyond the classroom as well. The quiz reports tool has become a fan favorite amongst professors by sharing actionable insights to help students better understand material. From identifying difficult questions and concepts that need reinforcement  to identifying which students need help, Kahoot! reports are designed with the teacher and students in mind.

“The faculty loves the detailed reporting feature that suggests when a student needs help,” Raghad said. “They also love the personalized learning tool for allowing students to practice what they missed and providing a personal learning development experience.”

As for new features, Kahoot! recently introduced Student Passes, a tool allowing professors to share access to various learning tools and apps that will get your students involved and excited about studying. The HCT team is looking forward to implementing this tool and extending Kahoot! to students as a resource to empower them in their learning journey.

Learn more about how HCT got started with Kahoot!

Sarah’s team also evaluates the various educational technology tools available on the market and works with the academic divisions to decide which tools to purchase.

Back in 2019, several instructors from the English Communication department were using Kahoot! in their classroom. After experiencing the success of using Kahoot! among students and professors, the engineering faculty members expressed their desire to also use Kahoot! for instruction. HCT decided it was time to purchase a site license. They knew that if the engineering faculty were finding value in this tool, other departments would as well.

Together with her colleagues, Sarah started rolling out a Kahoot! site license in November 2019 and quickly onboarded hundreds of teachers. HCT planned the implementation in strategy focusing on four main areas. 

1. Creating a communication plan to demonstrate the value of the tool
2. Organizing professional development to train staff
3. Supporting the system through the EdTech Learning Community
4. Fostering word of mouth and early adoption

HCT did a lot of communication and training to demonstrate the tool and its value, so everyone was able to decide whether they wanted to join Kahoot! and when. For example, the teaching with technology team published a series of posts about Kahoot! and other learning technology tools, as well as additional resource recommendations, on their EdTech blog to which many faculty members subscribe.

Professional development is mission-critical for new technology

When adopting a new learning technology tool at a system-wide level, it is important not only to provide information about the tool, but also to support faculty in the implementation of the tool with relevant professional development. Here are some of the activities the institution ran during the implementation of their Kahoot! site license:

As part of formal professional development, HCT offers a course called Creating Engaging Formative Quizzes in Kahoot!. In this course, instructors go through the technical aspects of creating a kahoot, and then the faculty are asked to try hosting a kahoot with their students and come back with reflections on how it went. HCT started offering this course before site-license implementation, and it was part of the reason faculty were so excited to start using Kahoot! in the classroom.

After the site-license implementation, HCT started conducting two additional courses called Creating Trackable Flipped Classroom Content and Adding Interactivity in your Online Class. These courses don’t show the technical aspects of Kahoot!; rather, they demonstrate how the tool can be used as part of pedagogically-sound teaching strategies.

HCT has now offered over 55 sessions to approximately 1500 participants that demonstrate how faculty can use Kahoot! in their classrooms. That is over 6400 hours of professional development addressing the implementation of Kahoot!.

Results of implementing a Kahoot! site license at HCT

Thanks to a combination of an efficient process for implementing a site-license and extensive word of mouth, HCT quickly onboarded hundreds of faculty members in November 2019. They were also able to offer professional development to help faculty create and launch kahoots for their students.

Just a few weeks after launch, HCT had 305 Kahoot! members and by mid-June, over 800 people were using the license. So far, teachers at HCT have created almost 1,000 unique kahoots, and that number is quickly growing as a new academic year starts.

Since launching the site-license, over 1,900 student-paced Kahoot! challenges have been launched and over 6,800 live sessions have been hosted with more than 86,000 participants. These numbers demonstrate how quickly HCT faculty have adopted and implemented Kahoot! in their classes and how students have been actively participating in the kahoots and continue to do so.

Tips for other higher education institutions

If you are planning to implement a Kahoot! license in your higher education institution, here are a few recommendations to make it a success:

• Use multiple modes of communication
  If you just send out one email to invite teachers, there is a high risk that they will miss it. Share info in a series of emails, put it in your blogs and social media channels. Do whatever you can to get that message out to the faculty.
• Focus on the pedagogical impact in your PD sessions
  There are always some teachers who are more hesitant to adopt new technology. To get their buy-in, ensure you include pedagogical integration as part of your PD sessions. When you demonstrate teaching approaches or strategies that they can use in their classroom with Kahoot!, you are going to have a much more successful launch.
• Prepare onboarding resources
  Put together a collection of resources teachers can access when starting their Kahoot! journey. When we started the rollout, we had several videos to share with our faculty and a set of ‘how to’ PDFs. For example, Kahoot! has many informative tutorial videos that can be a great starting point.
• Set up a support system
  Make sure teachers know where they can go for help after they start using Kahoot! in case they have questions or need further support. For example, we have an EdTech learning community that hosts our support resources as well as a discussion board. We also have a PD help email address where they can send questions.

The Kahoot! journey at HCT has been extremely successful, and the team is excited to continue exploring new ways of using Kahoot! at their institution. They hope sharing their best practices will prove to be useful for other higher education institutions who plan to use Kahoot! on a large scale.

In 2020, Sarah presented at Kahoot! EDU Summit to talk about HCT’s experience. Watch the video recording of her session to learn more! 

Interested in a site license for your school, district or higher education institution? Read more about Kahoot! EDU and the site license included in this offering.