OpenIRS-UCM: an integral solution for interactive response systems

During the last years many different tools have appeared devoted to facilitate the communication between teachers and students in a classroom. Most of these solutions, commonly referred to as Interactive Response Systems, are closed, too rigid, and in many cases too expensive for educational institutions. In this work we present an extended and improved version of the OpenIRS-UCM application, a free, easy to use and open source tool which supports diverse clickers, can be run in different platforms (Windows, Linux and MacOS) and is totally integrated with the well-known Moodle Learning Management System. We evaluate the OpenIRS-UCM application in terms of various software quality metrics (program complexity and usability), the level of acceptance currently achieved and its potential adoption in real life settings. Also, we perform an exhaustive comparison of the features that our application provides to those of various commercial tools, which reveals that OpenIRS-UCMexhibits many advantages over other major IRS players. Finally, we detail how our tool represents a remarkable advance in the research areas of engineering learning systems and engineering assessment.