Ombea

Ombea allows students to use laptops, tablets and smartphones as virtual clickers to engage in the learning process. Ombea is a web-enabled response option that lets students engage with the devices they are most familiar with.

Ombea allows for alphanumeric entry via mobile phone style input or a QWERTY style keyboard. The diversity of alphanumeric entry increases communication options and allows students to easily submit responses during interactive lectures. Ombea displays the question and answer choices on the students' mobile devices during polling.

Respond to Multiple Question Types

  • Multiple-choice
  • Alphanumeric
  • Multiple response
  • Essay

Ombea requires no special software to install or configure, and works with web browsers across multiple platforms and operating systems.

If you are interested in trying out Ombea please contact the IT Service Desk (it.servicedesk@ncl.ac.uk) for more information. 

Known Issues

There have been reports from some users that they receive the following error message when trying to run a session:

"OMBEA Response is being blocked and cannot work properly. Please ensure that Microsoft PowerPoint and OMBEA Response have full privileges. If the problem persists please contact OMBEA support."

We have not yet been able to identify what causes the error as it does not appear during every Ombea session but seems to be linked to question charts becoming corrupted if they already contain data from a previous session. We are working with Ombea developers to identify the cause of the problem.

We currently have a workaround that we recommend you carry out prior to presenting if your Ombea slides already contain session data from an earlier presentation.

If the error prompt appears the steps below will remedy the problem:

 

  1. Go to Clear Results and clear the Session History. OMBEA will loop through each slide clearing the data until it finds a corrupt slide.

 Clear Results

 

  1. When the error message comes up, dismiss it and then look through the presentation to find the first slide that has not been reset. This is the corrupt slide.
  2. Delete the chart on this slide alone but do not replace it yet.
  3. Loop back to the first step and repeat just in case there is another corrupt slide in the presentation.
  4. Once you've managed to clear the entire session with no error messages, go to the Properties and add the charts back in but only to the slides you had to delete them from. These slides can be identified by 'No Chart' in the Chart Type setting.

 Clear Chart

 

We appreciate this is by no means ideal, especially during a lecture, but we will update you as soon as we have feedback from the developers.

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