Enhancing web-based learning resources with quizzes through an Authoring Tool and an Audience Response System

Quizzes are among the most widely used resources in web-based education due to their many benefits. However, educators need suitable authoring tools that can be used to create reusable quizzes and to enhance existing materials with them. On the other hand, if teachers use Audience Response Systems (ARSs) they can get instant feedback from their students and thereby enhance their instruction. This paper presents an online authoring tool for creating reusable quizzes and enhancing existing learning resources with them, and a web-based ARS that enables teachers to launch the created quizzes and get instant feedback from the class. Both the authoring tool and the ARS were evaluated. The evaluation of the authoring tool showed that educators can effectively enhance existing learning resources in an easy way by creating and adding quizzes using that tool. Besides, the different factors that assure the reusability of the created quizzes are also exposed. Finally, the evaluation of the developed ARS showed an excellent acceptance of the system by teachers and students, and also it indicated that teachers found the system easy to set up and use in their classrooms

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