Vevox – Classroom Response system

Vevox allows you to ask questions of students to make teaching sessions like lectures more interactive.

Unlike older systems which used dedicated hardware “clickers”, Vevox is cloud based and uses students’ own mobile phones (or a laptop borrowed from the self-service cabinets in the Library if they prefer).

It has a lot of similarities with tools like Mentimeter which you may have used previously, but it integrates with PowerPoint, Teams and Brightspace, making it much more useful, and you can get up to 5000 participants on a session.

Find out more about the pedagogical benefits of classroom response technology.

Accessing Vevox

There are two addresses required:

Staff use vevox.hud.ac.uk to access the Vevox dashboard, where you set up polling sessions. Click the SSO button and you will log in with your usual University account. (For many more straightforward uses you won’t use this website at all, you can do everything you need in PowerPoint.)

Students use vevox.app – or a QR code displayed on screen – to access the poll.

Setting up your session

A session is a collection of poll questions that you will use on a particular occasion.

Vevox can be used in three main ways:

• Through PowerPoint
• Through the Vevox website
• Through Brightspace

We expect that the PowerPoint method will be the one that most people use. Start with the guide to logging in to the PowerPoint add-in and follow the link at the end of each guide for the next part to learn how the whole process works.

If you want to use Vevox either as a standalone session without PowerPoint or you want to use it through Brightspace, you need to create your session in the dashboard.

The guide Create my first session takes you through the basics of setting up your first session, creating your questions and running it within Vevox.

To use Vevox with Brightspace, create your session in the dashboard, then follow the guide to linking it to Brightspace.

Text formatting, formulas and equations

As of December 2024, some text formatting options have been added to the main question but not the multiple choice options.

It may look like you can’t do any text formatting in your options. In fact, you can but it gets a little bit technical.

You can use a text formatting language called LaTeX to add formatting, like this:

Undercooked food presents a risk of $$\textit{E.coli}$$ so ensure check the temperature before serving.

That would produce

Undercooked food presents a risk of E.coli so ensure check the temperature before serving.

So textit means italic text, textbf means bold text and it applies to everything inside the brackets.

You can define some quite complex formulae and equations. That is far beyond the scope of this guide, but there is more information available on the Vevox website

Generating questions with AI

Vevox can generate multiple choice questions based on an AI prompt either from the magic wand icon when you add a multiple choice question, or the AI quiz button in the menu next to the Create New button.

You can take this concept further using a technique developed at Huddersfield which uses Bing CoPilot Chat to create questions based on a PowerPoint file.

Watch a demonstration and download the How To Guide which contains the CoPilot prompt you need.

Student access

You need to click the Start Session button in order for students to access your polls.

If you are using Brightspace, you need to give students a link to the Vevox item created within your module. You can easily do this via an announcement and use the Link button to create a link to the content item.

For PowerPoint, there is a button in the Vevox integration to add a Joining Instructions slide. This gives a QR code and the session code which can be entered on vevox.app. You will need to make sure that you log in to Vevox and select the correct session in order to control to session from PowerPoint.

On the full-screen player on the dashboard, the same details are displayed by default.

Analytics

A comprehensive set of data is available for each session in the Dashboard. For sessions using Brightspace, the score will have been transferred to the Gradebook.

Other tools within Vevox

The Q&A feature lets students anonymously ask questions. You can use it like the Teams chat in a face to face class.

You can also use leaderboard and team features to add some competition and gamification.

Surveys are the self-paced version of Vevox, where students work through at their own pace rather than the lecturer controlling the experience.

And finally, you can use Vevox within Teams as an alternative to MS Polls. This might be useful if you are running the same presentation both face to face and online on different occasions.