iClicker Cloud Spring 2026 Pilot: What We Learned

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Why We Piloted

Over the past year, faculty across campus have asked the ITS Instructional Technology Group (ITG) about classroom polling and audience-response tools, signaling real, growing interest in ways to make courses more interactive.

This past spring, ITG ran a pilot of iClicker Cloud with a small cohort of Pomona College faculty. iClicker Cloud is the web-based successor to the legacy iClicker system, allowing students to participate in polls from a laptop, mobile device, or a physical remote. A key feature of the platform is its Canvas integration, which supports roster sync and grade passback directly to the Canvas gradebook.

The pilot launched in January 2026 with an orientation Lunch & Learn session, followed by a full semester of classroom use. At the end of the term, we collected feedback from two participating faculty and their students to understand how the experience went and what it could mean for broader adoption at Pomona. Here’s what they told us.

Instructor Experience

In our end-of-semester feedback survey, faculty ratings on ease of use came back favorable overall. One instructor described setup as “Very Easy” and the interface as “Very Intuitive,” while the other reported a more neutral experience. Both rated in-class reliability positively, and both told us they preferred iClicker Cloud to the legacy iClicker system.

The most concrete usability advantage faculty noted was the elimination of physical remotes. As one instructor put it: “I don’t have to waste time passing around physical remotes and exchanging the ones that are not working/have no battery.” The other instructor highlighted the value of embedding polls directly into their teaching: “I enjoyed using iClicker to ask general survey questions to gauge their interest in certain topics to segue into a discussion.” The ease of using iClicker to capture questions built into the instructor’s PowerPoint slides was also rated highly. Overall, both instructors felt that iClicker Cloud worked well to support their teaching goals.

The Canvas integration is where the two instructors’ experience diverged most sharply. One instructor was satisfied with the Canvas integration and confirmed that both roster and grade sync worked as expected. The other had a notably different experience: the integration’s structure required adjusting their existing grading approach to match what iClicker Cloud’s Canvas grade sync would allow. This friction was significant enough that the instructor ultimately stopped using the Canvas integration altogether. From this, we concluded that the Canvas integration works well for some grading setups, but may not accommodate the full range of how Pomona faculty structure participation grades.

Student Experience

If there’s one metric from this pilot that stands out above the rest, it’s this: student experience was the highest-rated area in our end-of-semester survey. Both faculty told us they saw engagement increase with iClicker Cloud, and the student responses backed that up. Every student surveyed (100%) said iClicker activities helped them feel more involved in class, and most (83%) described activities as “Engaging” or “Very Engaging.”

A few student comments help explain why, particularly around equity and access. One student told us, “As someone who isn’t very comfortable verbally participating in class, it eased my nerves and allowed me to share my input from my seat.” Another appreciated the anonymity of it: “I liked that it anonymized active participation.” A third pointed to how it shaped classroom discussion afterward: “I thought it was an engaging way to see responses and classmates’ thoughts… [my instructor] had us talk about it afterwards and then reevaluate our options, which was very helpful.” These benefits supported student learning, and 91.7% of students surveyed reported that using iClicker Cloud helped them learn.

Faculty observations were consistent with student feedback. One instructor noted that shyer students feel more comfortable participating in these low-stakes, ungraded activities, and that seeing how the whole class responds helps students gauge their own understanding of the material.

Next Steps: iClicker Cloud Events

Given limited faculty demand for this specific tool, we’re not planning a campus-wide rollout of the complete iClicker Cloud platform at this time. We learned from the pilot that the tool may not be a universal fit across Pomona’s range of teaching contexts.

Instead, iClicker Cloud Events will soon be available to Pomona faculty. This feature lets you create and run one-time polling sessions that participants can join by web browser, mobile device, or physical iClicker remote. It’s not the full classroom version of iClicker Cloud; it’s designed as a lightweight alternative for when you do not need to manage a roster, track student progress over multiple sessions, or connect to a gradebook to award points.

If you’re interested in classroom polling tools or want to be part of future conversations about what we adopt, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to the Instructional Technology Group at ServiceDesk@Pomona.edu.

Lastly, we’d like to extend an enormous thank you to our faculty participants who worked with us to pilot iClicker Cloud!