Glossary: live polling & audience response terms

"Audience response," "formative assessment," "clicker," "word cloud" — a lot of this space borrows vocabulary from classrooms, corporate training, agile teams and pub quiz nights, and the same underlying idea often goes by three or four different names depending on who's using it. This glossary defines the terms in plain language, without assuming you already know the jargon.

Asynchronous Quiz

A quiz that respondents complete on their own schedule, individually, rather than all at once in a live, synchronized session. It's the standard format for take-home study sets, pre-class reading checks, and self-paced onboarding, where results trickle in over hours or days instead of appearing the moment the quiz ends. The opposite is a live or "synchronous" quiz, where everyone answers the same question at the same time and sees results instantly.

Audience Response System (ARS)

Any system that lets a presenter, teacher or host collect input from a group in real time and see the aggregated results immediately, rather than gathering feedback after the fact. The category started with physical handheld remotes in lecture halls and conference rooms in the 1990s and 2000s, and has since moved almost entirely to software, where each person answers on a phone or laptop they already own. "Audience response system," "live polling tool," and "clicker system" are all names for roughly the same idea, from different eras.

Clicker (Classroom Response System)

The original term for the small handheld remote that let students submit a multiple-choice answer, which a receiver plugged into the instructor's computer would tally instantly. Systems like this were common in large university lecture halls in the 2000s and gave the format its lasting nickname. The physical hardware has mostly disappeared, but "clicker question" persists as informal shorthand for any quick, real-time, in-class poll — even when everyone is answering on a phone rather than a dedicated device.

Corporate Town Hall Poll

A live poll run during a company-wide all-hands meeting, typically to take a pulse-check on morale, gauge reaction to an announcement, or surface anonymous questions for leadership to answer on the spot. Anonymity tends to matter more here than in a classroom, since employees may be reluctant to publicly disagree with a executive in front of hundreds of colleagues. Common formats include a simple sentiment scale ("how confident do you feel about X"), an open-text word cloud, and upvotable Q&A.

Dot Voting

A quick prioritization technique in which each participant is given a fixed number of votes ("dots") to distribute across a list of options — historically literal sticky dots placed on a printed sheet, now often done digitally. It's a workshop and retrospective staple for narrowing a long brainstorm down to the few ideas a group actually wants to act on, because it converts an open-ended discussion into a ranked list in a couple of minutes.

Exit Ticket

A short question or two, posed at the very end of a class or training session, used to check what people actually understood before they leave the room. Exit tickets are typically ungraded and take under a minute to answer — the point isn't to score anyone, it's to give the instructor a quick read on what needs revisiting next time. It's one of the most common formative assessment techniques in K-12 and higher-ed classrooms.

Formative Assessment

An informal check for understanding conducted during instruction, so a teacher can adjust their teaching in the moment rather than finding out weeks later that a concept didn't land. Formative assessment is typically low-stakes or ungraded — exit tickets, quick polls, and cold-call-style questions are all examples. It's usually contrasted with summative assessment, which evaluates learning after instruction is complete.

Gamified Quiz

A quiz format that layers game mechanics — points, countdown timers, streaks, sound effects, live leaderboards, team play — on top of ordinary questions to increase engagement and energy in the room. The style was popularized in classrooms and corporate training by tools built around a game-show feel, and it's now common well beyond education, in onboarding, conference sessions, and pub-quiz-style events.

Icebreaker Question

A low-stakes opening prompt used at the start of a meeting, class or event to get people participating before the "real" content begins. A word cloud asking "one word to describe your week" or a quick multiple-choice poll about the room ("how many times have you used this tool before?") are typical examples — the goal is participation and warmth, not accuracy.

Kahoot Alternative

A general term for any live quiz tool that competes with Kahoot!, the game-show-style quiz platform that popularized colorful, timed, point-scoring live quizzes in classrooms and later in corporate training. People search for "Kahoot alternative" for reasons ranging from price, to wanting features Kahoot doesn't have (open-ended questions, word clouds, surveys), to wanting a tool that presents over slides they've already built rather than requiring a dedicated quiz format. PollSlide is one such alternative — its quiz mode runs the same live, timed, leaderboard-driven format, but over any existing Keynote, PowerPoint, Google Slides or PDF deck rather than a separate slide builder.

Leaderboard

A live or end-of-session ranking of quiz participants or teams by score, shown to build competitive energy and give people a reason to care about the next question. A detail that trips up a lot of first-time hosts: scoring by raw team total quietly rewards whichever team has the most people, since more players simply means more chances that someone in the group knows any given answer. Scoring by average-per-player instead keeps a table of two competitive against a table of six.

Likert Scale Question

A survey question format that asks respondents to rate their agreement, satisfaction, or frequency on an ordered scale — most commonly five or seven points, running from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree." Named after psychologist Rensis Likert, it's the backbone of employee engagement surveys, course evaluations, and customer satisfaction polls, because it turns a subjective opinion into a number that can be averaged and tracked over time.

Live Polling

Collecting responses from a group in real time during an ongoing presentation, meeting or class, with results appearing on screen within seconds, rather than a survey link people fill out separately and results reviewed later. The defining feature is the immediacy: a presenter asks a question, the room answers on their own devices, and everyone sees the aggregated result before moving on.

Live Q&A (Crowdsourced Q&A)

A format where audience members submit questions during a talk or meeting, and other attendees can upvote the ones they'd most like answered, surfacing the most relevant questions to the top for the speaker or moderator to address live. It replaces the older pattern of a roving microphone or a show of hands, and tends to produce better questions because people can see what's already been asked before submitting their own.

Mentimeter Alternative

A general term for tools that compete with Mentimeter, a live polling platform particularly known for word clouds and open-ended visualizations used in meetings, classrooms and conference talks. People look for alternatives for reasons like pricing tiers, wanting quiz or study-set modes in the same tool rather than a separate app, or wanting to present over a deck they've already built. PollSlide is one option among several, covering the same live-polling and word-cloud territory plus quizzes, surveys and study sets in one tool.

Multiple Choice Poll

The most common live poll format: the presenter shows a question with several fixed options, the audience each picks one, and the result appears instantly as a bar chart or percentage breakdown. It's popular because it's fast to answer, fast to read at a glance, and works whether five people or five hundred are responding.

Open-Ended Question

A poll or survey question that collects a free-text response rather than a choice from a fixed list — "what's one thing we should change?" instead of a multiple-choice list of options. Open-ended questions surface ideas a list of pre-written choices would never capture, at the cost of being harder to aggregate at a glance; word clouds and sentiment analysis are the two most common ways to make a pile of free-text answers scannable.

Peer Instruction

A teaching method, developed by physicist Eric Mazur, in which the instructor poses a conceptual multiple-choice question, students vote individually, then discuss their answer with a neighbor before voting again on the same question. The size of the shift between the first and second vote is itself useful diagnostic information — a big shift toward the correct answer suggests students can teach each other the concept; little movement suggests the instructor needs to re-explain it directly.

Pub Quiz

An informal live trivia competition held at a bar or pub, where teams answer rounds of questions read aloud or shown on screen and compare scores at the end of the night. The format originated in the UK decades ago and has since spread worldwide, running on everything from a host with a microphone and paper score sheets to fully digital scoring where teams answer on their own phones. See our full guide to running a pub quiz for planning, question-writing and scoring details.

QR Code Poll

A poll or question that a projected or printed QR code, so audience members can join by scanning it with their phone camera rather than typing a URL and code by hand. It's become the standard way to get a room onto a live poll with zero app install, since virtually every modern phone can scan a QR code straight from its camera app.

Real-Time Feedback

Any mechanism that gives a presenter, teacher or facilitator an instant read on how a group is responding to what's happening right now, rather than feedback collected and reviewed afterward. Live polls, pace checks ("thumbs up if this makes sense"), and running sentiment during a talk are all forms of real-time feedback — the shared trait is that the person on stage can see it and adjust before moving on.

Retrospective (Agile)

A recurring team meeting, common at the end of a sprint in agile software development, where the team reflects on what went well, what didn't, and what to change going forward. Many teams run retrospectives with an anonymous poll, dot-voting board, or word cloud rather than open discussion alone, since anonymity tends to surface more honest feedback — especially on distributed or remote teams where junior members may be reluctant to criticize a decision in front of the room.

Sentiment Analysis

In the context of open-text poll or survey answers, sentiment analysis is the automatic classification of free-text responses as broadly positive, negative or neutral (or into finer emotional categories), so a facilitator doesn't have to read every individual comment to get a sense of the room. It's especially useful at scale — a hundred one-word answers to "how did that feel?" are hard to skim manually, but easy to summarize automatically.

Slido Alternative

A general term for tools competing with Slido, a live polling and Q&A platform widely used at conferences, webinars and corporate meetings, particularly for its audience Q&A upvoting. People search for alternatives for reasons like wanting quiz and study-set features in the same product, different pricing, or a tool built to run over slides directly rather than a separate polling window. PollSlide covers similar live polling and Q&A ground, along with quiz and study-set modes in the same tool.

Study Set / Flashcards

A set of question-and-answer pairs designed for self-testing and repeated review, typically used for individual, self-paced study rather than a group live event. Digital study sets often support spaced repetition, resurfacing cards a learner has gotten wrong more often than ones they consistently get right, which is the main advantage over a static printed flashcard deck.

Summative Assessment

A formal, typically graded evaluation of what someone has learned, given after instruction is finished — a final exam, a end-of-unit test, a certification quiz. It's the counterpart to formative assessment: formative assessment happens during learning to guide it, summative assessment happens after learning to measure it.

Team-Based Learning (TBL)

A structured teaching method, distinct from casually splitting a class into groups for one activity, in which students are organized into fixed teams for an entire course. Each unit typically follows a set sequence: an individual readiness quiz, then the same quiz taken again as a team, then application exercises the teams work through together — the comparison between individual and team scores is itself part of the learning design.

Word Cloud

A visual summary of open-text poll responses in which words that appear more frequently are rendered larger, so a glance at the image shows what the room said most, without reading every individual answer. It's a common way to make an icebreaker question like "one word to describe today" or "one word for how this project is going" instantly readable to an entire audience at once.