Abstract
Background There is a need to develop evidence-based strategies to maximise student engagement in online learning contexts. Audience response systems (ARS) are well-established active learning tools that improve engagement in the face-to-face classroom, but they remain under-researched in the online context. Aims This study aimed to directly compare student engagement, perceptions and learning following clinical anatomy revision sessions including interactive questions asked using an ARS (Mentimeter) compared to interactive questions asked using videoconferencing interaction only. Materials and methods We designed a series of 11 online clinical anatomy revision sessions advertised to all undergraduate medical students at a UK university. Five of these sessions were randomised to include interactive questions asked using an ARS (Mentimeter), and the remainder included interactive questions asked using videoconferencing (Microsoft Teams) functionality only. Data on attendance and engagement were collected, and attendees were asked to complete an end-of-session survey and an end-of-session test of knowledge. Results On average, significantly more attendees engaged with each interactive question asked using Mentimeter compared to questions asked without (30.1% vs 6.4%; p=2.20×10(-16)). Students scored higher on the end-of-session test of knowledge following sessions using Mentimeter (6.6 vs 5.3; p=0.007) and had a higher survey response rate (24.6% vs 14.3%; p=0.003). Students reported that Mentimeter improved engagement, interest, learning and testing of knowledge. Conclusions This study adds to the existing literature by demonstrating student engagement is significantly higher when using ARS (Mentimeter) to ask interactive questions during online revision sessions than using videoconferencing interaction alone.