The pmc forums have a wonderful polling feature, but we've noticed throughout hosting PBL it sometimes renders some odd time stamps, which we understood why it did, but we thought maybe there was a nice solution!

A countdown timer would be exactly how you imagine it. It would render something like days, hours, minutes and seconds.

An example: If you make a poll and set it two run two days the poll will say "results will be revealed tomorrow" which isn't exactly true. In a countdown timer, we'd instead have it say "2 days left..." "1 day(s) 23 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds left" etc. This would be robust and tell people exactly when the poll closes, even with many days left.


If this isn't doable, using the standard measure from a countdown website such as: 78:16:18 (online-stopwatch.com) would also be nice, on the website it could be like this:

Or something similar.

We had confusion about how long our PBL finals poll was running due to previously explained problem, so this would obviously prevent such a confusion handily!