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Wooclap raises $29M: Interview with Neal Legler, Instructional Designer, Director of Center for Innovative Design and Instruction at Utah State University.
04.09.2025 • 3 minutes
Why would you recommend Wooclap? What problems does it solve and what advantages does it offer compared to other tools?
I recommend Wooclap for its ease of use for teachers and students, its variety of polling modes (anonymous, graded, participation, results, attendance, competition, asynchronous), it’s variety of question types, and its excellent AI authoring, to name a few. It provides many different ways that a teacher can engage a class!
Do you participate in the co-creation of some Wooclap and/or Wooflash features? What do you enjoy about this process?
We’re new enough as customers, that I have not yet had the opportunity to participate in co-creation; however, I would welcome the opportunity.
What is your favorite use case?
Again, because we are new customers, we haven’t seen a whole lot of use cases just yet. But my favorite use cases so far have been our STEM classes, Chemistry and Physics, which have succeeded in using the tool in their large classes without much trouble. These classes use heavy symbolic notation and work with a lot of students at once. It handled the use case as well as I could have hoped!
Wooclap now has additional funding. Do you consider this good news?
I’m very glad to hear of Wooclap’s additional funding. So far it has proven to be a great company with a lot of passion, innovation, and agility. It has managed to create a product that is strongly competitive with much older players on the market. I can only imagine how much it will be able to do with additional funding to make an even better product.
AI: a threat or an opportunity for higher education?
AI is both a threat and an opportunity for higher education. It’s an opportunity in that it provides significant new opportunities for creating interactive learning resources that are highly personalized and highly adaptive. It can greatly expand student capacity to make big ideas come to life. However, it is a threat in the sense that any technology that upends entire industries and ways of doing things is a threat. Teachers and students have to rapidly evolve in their understanding of the skillsets needed to get by in the AI age. Teachers and students both still struggle to get beyond seeing AI as something that will one-shot write a term paper, make an odd image, or replace a Google search. I also worry about how novices in an industry will gain the fluency in their field (i.e. programming) that will be needed to really capitalize on AI’s abilities if they don’t have many hands-on opportunities to apply baseline skills themselves. Someone, hopefully higher education, will have to figure this out.
Is there a book or resource you would recommend to teachers and trainers who want to teach more effectively?
Books that have worked well for our institution include Small Teaching by James Lang, Hitting Pause by Gail Taylor Rice, Make it Stick by Roediger, McDaniel, and Brown, The New Science of Learning by Doyle and Zakrajsek, and Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe (for a more design-focused approach).
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The Wooclap team
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