Customizable teaching on mobile devices in higher education

Every teacher struggles with the student’s attention when giving a lecture. It is not easy to meet every single student at its knowledge level in a seminar group, and it becomes nearly impossible in huge university lectures with hundreds of students. With the spread of mobile devices among students, Audience Response Systems (ARS) proved as an easy and cheap solution to activate the audience and to compare the students’ real knowledge base with the lecturer’s estimation. Today, lecturers are able to choose between a huge variety of different ARSs. But as every lecturer has a very individual teaching style, he or she is not yet able to create or customize their individual audience response teaching scenario within a single system. The available systems are quite similar to each other and mostly support only a handful of different scenarios. Therefore, this work identified the abstract core elements of ARSs and developed a model to create individual and customizable scenarios for the students’ mobile devices. Teachers become able to build their individual application, define the appearance on the students’ phones in a scenario construction kit and even determine the scenario’s behavior logic. Two ARS applications were implemented and used to evaluate the model in real lectures for the last four years. A first ARS was integrated into the university’s learning management system ILIAS and provided lecturers with basic question functionalities, whereas a second and more advanced stand-alone version enabled lecturers to use personal scenarios in a variety of lecture settings. Hence, scenarios like quizzes, message boards, teacher feedback and live experiments became possible. The approaches were evaluated from a technical, student and lecturer perspective in various courses of different areas and sizes. The new model showed great results and potential in customization, but the implementation reached its limits as it lacked in performance scalability for complex scenarios with a large amount of students

Customized teaching scenarios for smartphones in university lecture settings: experiences with several teaching scenarios using the MobileQuiz2

Many teachers use Audience Response Systems (ARS) in lectures to re-activate their listeners and to get an insight in students’ knowledge of the current lecture contents. Plenty of such applications have been developed in recent years, they provide a high variety of different teaching scenarios with the use of the students’ smartphones, including quizzes, lecture feedback and dynamic message boards. We developed a novel application based on an abstract model to enable this variety of customizable teaching scenarios within one application. After presenting the application to the first charge of lecturers, the responses were quite good, and several new teaching scenarios were created and used. This paper presents first experiences when using a variety of customizable teaching scenarios, the special opportunities and challenges as well as the opinions of lecturers and students, which we collected with a survey at the end of the semester