Click, click, bust

With the rise of the CPS handheld RF class-participation device — or the “clicker,” as everyone from professors to bookstore staffers have taken to calling it —Binghamton University has taken yet another step down the path to total corporate domination.

That being said, the clicker idea is a good one. Having students register their attendance and their answers on quizzes through the use of “America’s Funniest Home Videos”-style touch pads helps eliminate tons of paperwork and bureaucracy through an elegant centralized data clearinghouse (in theory, anyway).

The problem is that here at BU, there’s no centralized plan for professors’ adopting the things. The choice to use the clickers is left entirely to professors, which leads to a number of issues.

– Each class requires a different handheld pad. Some necessitate more features than others, meaning that the clicker you just bought last semester for Marketing 311 won’t be good for Astronomy 114 this time around. Time to lay out more cash!

– It’s seemingly incumbent upon professors who want to use the system to figure out how themselves, often dragging students through the learning process with them. The technical difficulties and apparently steep learning curve involved (for both faculty and students) are disruptive and take away from class time.

Additionally, the entire system is a giant rip-off. Students are forced to pay at every turn: first, for the class textbook — which is already over-priced and probably must be purchased new because it’s in its tenth edition—then of course there’s the device itself to buy.

The real kick in the pants comes when students are required to pay for the ability to access their course data online, which is a requirement for registering in a class. Sure, the company is nice enough to give you a promotional code to waive the fee once — provided you don’t hand over the card with the code on it to the bookstore staff when you’re buying the clicker — but every time a student wants to enroll in another class, eInstruction (the company that designed the system) gets to bill them for more.

One way to fix all this nonsense would be for BU administrators to institute a school-wide clicker program. Yes, it’s one step closer to completely selling the soul of a once-famous liberal-arts college to soulless big business. But giving every incoming student a device that they could use for every class of their college careers (and charging them for it on their semester bill, of course) would make the system a lot more efficient — and egalitarian. And if the University does its homework carefully, it could even pick a company that wouldn’t pick students’ pockets at every turn.