Customizable Learning Scenarios for Students’ Mobile Devices in Large University Lectures: A Next Generation Audience Response System

Abstract

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.