Activating students with an audience response system

In higher education we are confronted with a number of challenges. This includes an increasing diversity of students with respect to their basic knowledge, motivation and learning skills. To overcome these challenges, we changed the instructional strategy from traditional lectures towards a more seminar-like format that actively engages students. In this article, we will reflect on difficulties that arose when implementing a voting system in a first-semester business mathematics course. We will give an insight into how we redesigned the traditional lecture in order to successfully launch this instructional strategy. In particular, we will show the extent of the benefit gained by combining an audience response system with a peer-instruction phase