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A Model for Customized In-class Learning Scenarios - An Approach to Enhance Audience Response Systems with Customized Logic and Interactivity
Abstract
Audience Response Systems (ARS) are quite common nowadays. With a very high smart phone availability among students, the usage of ARS within classroom settings has become quite easy. Together with the trend for developing web applications, the number of ARS implementations grew rapidly in recent years. Many of these applications are quite similar to each other, and fit into many classroom learning scenarios like test questions, self-assessment and audience feedback. But they are mostly limited to their original purpose. Using another question types or little differences in the existing quiz logic cause considerable effort to develop as they have to be implemented separately. We searched for similarities between the different ARS implementations, matched them to a universal process and present a generalized model for all of them. We implemented a prototype that serves many known scenarios ranging from simple knowledge feedback questions up to complex marketplace simulations. A first evaluation in different course types with up to fifty students showed, that the model satisfies our expectations and offers a lot of new opportunities for classroom learning scenarios.
Audience Response Systems are a common sight in today’s university lectures. They are used to increase student’s motivation, self reflection and activation during large lectures with up to hundreds of students. The wide distribution of mobile devices supports this development, as teachers no longer have to hand out special hardware clickers, but can build on a variety of mobile web applications, which are able to perform classroom activities, like quizzes, lecture feedback and brainstorming. Therefore, most systems do either support a reasonable amount of basic scenarios or are very specialized in a few less common scenarios. But teachers often want to customize an established scenario for their own needs. This could be a small variation like an additional information text to a multiple choice question up to a more complex background logic to perform live experiments. Therefore, we developed a model and wrote a prototype which enables the users to customize their established learning scenarios or even build novel ones. Our teachers are now able to design and customize their own in-class learning scenarios, fill them with their content, use them in their lectures and reflect the results with their students. But besides the technological capabilities, designing a well-founded learning scenario still needs a certain amount of time and didactic experience.
Audience response systems (ARS) or “clickers” are becoming more and more popular tools for managing audience response or voting feedback for certain questions. Currently, they are more commonly used in education, mostly to engage students during lectures in large classrooms and give the lecturer prompt anonymous response from the audience. The article presents a concept of using a clickers software, which can run on a mobile, tablet, PDA or PC. Such a solution offers flexible student-lecturer interaction. The article compares results of students' learning outcomes for the students taught with and without question based learning methodology.
Despite the rapid emergence of game-based learning as a method for conveying educational content, constructing pedagogies which effectively combine elements of entertainment gaming with methods of instruction remains a demanding task. Through the notion of 'intuitive guided' learning, this paper presents an approach which seeks to facilitate a structured learning experience whilst allowing learners to explore a non-linear environment. To do so, a framework is presented which externalizes the assessment process in a serious game, whilst also providing a means for game content to be adapted dynamically to translate the outcomes of the assessment process to effective feedback. A developed prototype is implemented to examine the theory in-practice through the case of a game for civil defence training in schools. Using this prototype, a range of methods in which achievements might be related to learner actions are introduced, and their subsequent implications for intuitive learning discussed. Furthermore, the prototype illustrates how assessment rules can be defined as external to the game and subsequently used to generate feedback for a virtual companion who assumes the role of a more-able partner. The long-term potential of such methods as a source of data on player behaviour is discussed, suggesting further benefits the technique might offer to educators seeking to introduce game-based learning within the curriculum in a blended fashion.
This paper presents a fuzzy constraint-directed approach to the development of agent-based business simulator for supporting collaborative learning. The advantages of this approach can be summarized in two folds: it provides (1) a general purpose framework for the knowledge representation and problem solving in business simulation, and (2) a fully distributed computational model along with a negotiation algorithm that can be easily built to mimic more closely to the real-world scenario of collaborative strategic planning and decision making. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework, we have prototyped a business simulator, MANAGE, and applied successfully to build a beer game for collaborative learning.
Lectures are good for presenting information and providing explanations, but because they lack active participation they have been neglected.
Students' experiences were evaluated after exposing them to the use of voting during lectures in their paediatrics course. Questions were delivered to the students taking paediatrics course. Thirty-six students out of the total of 40 (90%) attended the opening lecture, at which the first survey concerning previous experiences of lectures was performed. Thirty-nine students (98%) answered the second series of questions at the end of the paediatrics course.
Most of the students felt that voting improved their activity during lectures, enhanced their learning, and that it was easier to make questions during lectures than earlier.
The students gained new, exciting insights much more often during the paediatrics course than before. We as teachers found that voting during lectures could easily overcome some of the obstacles of good lecturing.
The use of serious games in a wide variety of educational settings is gaining popularity, given their ability to engage and motivate learners - particularly the current generation, who have grown up regularly playing video games. However, despite the current “buzz” surrounding serious games, there are many bad examples; this has been attributed to developers supplanting game design without adequate attention to proper instructional design. Given the importance of instructional design, we have developed a tutorial (“minicourse”) that, combines “hands-on” activities and didactic instruction to emphasizes its role in the development and evaluation of serious games. By outlining the developmental process of several example serious games for health professions education, the tutorial also emphasizes the inherent interdisciplinary nature of serious games design and potential issues that may arise when an interdisciplinary team embarks on such a project. Here, we describe the tutorial by providing greater details regarding the “hands-on” activities, the material covered within the tutorial, and attendee perceptions regarding serious games before and after the tutorial. Our goal is to bring awareness to the importance of ensuring a balance between game design and instructional design when developing serious games.
In this paper, we present a lightweight, media-supporting quiz application for mobile devices. The idea is to use the students' own smartphones as voting devices and provide a quiz administration module which is integrated into the existing university's e-learning platform. For establishing the link between the devices and the platform we use dynamically generated Quick Response (QR) codes. The quiz is implemented as a web application, also providing the use of media content such as pictures and videos. We briefly evaluate our approach with respect to usability for students and lecturers, limits of the mobile browser technology and the QR code, and the impact on the university's network infrastructure.
Using the Storytelling Alice programming environment to create computer-animated movies inspires middle school girls' interest in learning to program computers.