"I Can't Live Without Wooclap": The Joke That Became a Teaching Method

How does a professor make the student watching from home at ten p.m. feel as much a part of the class as the one sitting in the front row? That's the daily challenge facing Diego Fraille, digital education manager and professor of Technology and Education at Universidad Nebrija. His answer is active learning: methodologies that turn students from spectators into protagonists, even when they're not on the same schedule as everyone else.

Fraille was instrumental in bringing Wooclap to Nebrija during its early rollout, and several semesters on, he's still one of its most engaged users. In an interview with Emily Cuevas from Wooclap, he gave an honest account of what actually changes once active learning stops being a nice idea and becomes a classroom habit.

The Challenge: Engaging Those Who Aren't in the Room

Fraille's department works primarily with online programs, where live attendance isn't required. That means a class of 50 might see only four or five students logged in at any given moment — everyone else catches up via recording later. And among the handful who do show up live, many are too self-conscious to speak up.

Wooclap, Fraille explains, started out solving something simple: getting students to actually attend class. From there, the goal became more ambitious — making the experience equally rich whether a student joins live or catches up afterward. That's where the Participant Pace feature does the heavy lifting. It lets him duplicate any activity, so asynchronous students — who might otherwise feel like "passive spectators on the sidelines" — can jump in whenever it works for them.

Research backs up that instinct: studies show that active participation, whether live or asynchronous, correlates with stronger engagement and better academic outcomes than passively attending lectures. Active learning, in other words, isn't about the clock. It's about whether students have a real reason to engage.

A Workflow Built Session by Session

Fraille doesn't improvise. Wooclap is written into the lesson plan from the start, not bolted on afterward. He picks the pedagogical activity first, a brainstorm, a debate, a slow-look exercise on an image, and only then goes looking in Wooclap for the question format that fits. The slides come last, not first.

That order flips the usual script: the tech doesn't drive the teaching, it supports it. And the loop doesn't close when class ends. Fraille gets notified when new answers are submitted in  Participant Pace activities, he reviews them between sessions, screenshots the most interesting ones, and brings those back to open the next class for group discussion. It's a concrete way of putting session data to work, rather than letting it sit unread.

Some of these moments even get archived in a small repository on the virtual campus: debate screenshots, ideas for using a given technology in class, all there for students to revisit later. Active learning leaves a paper trail.

Memes, Wheels, and Metacognition: Playfulness with a Purpose

Asked which two features have made the biggest difference, Fraille doesn't hesitate: memes and spin wheel. It sounds playful, but the intent behind it is deliberate: building metacognition, getting students to actually reflect on how they're learning.

Because Wooclap lets students upload those images as live answers projected on screen, a solo reflection exercise turns into a shared moment. The spin wheel adds a different kind of gamified randomness: it picks who speaks next or which topic comes up, taking the pressure off the professor as the one always doing the choosing.

Artificial Intelligence, Used Thoughtfully

Nebrija hasn't rushed into AI, and it hasn't rejected it either. Fraille describes the university's stance as deliberately cautious: staying out of the hype cycle in either direction, whether that's blind techno-optimism or blanket resistance. The deciding factor is always pedagogy first, technology second.

In practice, that means using Wooclap's AI to speed up the parts of teaching that used to eat up time: drafting a batch of questions for a formative assessment or an exam review session, then checking the results, or summarizing an open brainstorm into conclusions the whole group can use. The professor still validates, edits, and makes the final call. AI just clears the blank-page problem out of the way.

"It speeds things up. It saves you time because you're not starting from nothing, you already have a set of options in front of you. The process is already moving."

It's a way of using AI and Wooclap that doesn't replace the professor's judgment. It just frees up time for what professors actually do best: interpreting the material and adapting it to their students.

The Result: Students Who Stop Apologizing

The clearest sign that something's working, Fraille says, doesn't show up in any analytics dashboard. It shows up in the hallway, when one professor asks another how this whole Wooclap thing works, because they've heard good things. That word of mouth, backed by Nebrija posting its highest question volume last semester, is what convinces him the culture in the classroom has genuinely shifted.

That shift reaches students who never attend a single live class, too. Fraille says students who once apologized for missing sessions in person have written to tell him that Wooclap's activities make them feel like part of the group, and that they've stopped constantly apologizing for working through the program at their own pace. Asked to sum up what Wooclap has brought to Nebrija in one line, this is it:

"It gives students the chance to participate without fear of being judged, and to feel like an active part of their own learning."

The Takeaway for Your Own Classroom

Diego Fraille's story isn't really about a miracle tool. It's about a way of designing teaching: methodology first, technology second, always with an eye on including whoever isn't physically in the room. Approached that way, memes and all, active learning stops being a one-off technique and becomes just how class runs.

If any of this sounds familiar, uneven participation, asynchronous students who feel shut out, wanting to use AI without losing pedagogical control, it might be worth trying for yourself.

Try Wooclap today and transform your training sessions: https://www.wooclap.com/