Dr Luli Faber teaches in the School of Biomedical Sciences at The University of Queensland, specialising in physiology and neuroscience. She teaches to a diverse group of students, including those in Allied Health, Science, and Medicine programmes. Like many educators, she found the traditional lecture format limiting, with students passively absorbing information without real-time engagement. To address this, she turned to EchoPoll, a tool that has since re-shaped her teaching approach.
So, she decided to change that.
“I started using EchoPoll because I found that I was quite dissatisfied with the standard passive lecture format where I was just delivering all this information to students sitting there, and I didn’t even know if they were listening to me, let alone understanding me. So I really wanted a way to engage with them and to find out if they were understanding what I was saying and be able to address any misunderstandings and misconceptions in the lecture as we went.”
The impact of EchoPoll on her students has been significant. Instead of leaving lectures feeling drained, students now actively participate in discussions, creating a more dynamic and engaging atmosphere.
“Instead of at the end of a 50-minute lecture all being quite tired and drained, there’s a much lighter atmosphere. Most of them in the room engage with the poll, and they’ve given me really good feedback through teacher evaluations. They’ve said they find it really helpful to understand what they were learning, where to focus their study, and whether they were retaining the information.”
While it’s difficult to directly measure the impact of polling on grades – especially as she has implemented several new teaching strategies simultaneously – Dr Faber is confident that the active learning environment contributes positively to student comprehension and retention.
One common concern among educators is how to balance interactive activities like polling with the need to cover large amounts of content. Dr Faber has found that prioritising deeper learning over content volume is a worthwhile trade-off. She also observes that, beyond reinforcing subject knowledge, polling also helps students develop critical skills such as teamwork, communication, and analytical thinking – skills that are crucial for their future careers.
Dr Faber unpacks this further by explaining how she uses polling in group work activities: “If I put up a poll that asks them to assess a picture, or establish which one of these pictures doesn’t belong in a certain context, that will stimulate discussion with others that will help their communication skills, their group teamwork, their social learning, and also their critical thinking where they start having to think critically and practise creating argument and evaluating their thinking in communication with others.”
To create a safe and inclusive learning environment, Dr Faber uses EchoPoll’s anonymous mode, allowing students to respond freely without fear of judgment. “I use the anonymous feature for students so that they feel safe to engage. I don’t want to deter them from participating because of a fear of exposure or getting something wrong.”
While Dr Faber records her lectures using EchoVideo to support student revision and flexibility, she sees EchoPoll as a key tool for transforming the live classroom experience. By integrating real-time polling into her lectures, she fosters an interactive, student-centred learning environment where engagement, discussion, and critical thinking take centre stage. Through this approach, her students don’t just passively receive information – they actively shape their own learning.
