Abstract:

The article deals with the sustainability problem of teaching and learning: How can technical and methodological knowledge be efficiently conveyed, effectively learned and recalled from memory beyond the study period? Empirical teaching and learning research provides answers based on the theories and findings of cognitive science, learning and memory psychology. Two learning-promoting effects that have been researched for over a hundred years are of crucial importance for long-term retention: "Testing Effect" through active recall of memory content instead of repeated passive reading and "Spacing Effect" through distributed testing. Since Ebbinghaus (1885) the forgetting curve and its iterative compensation has been known. In order to use the testing effect and the effect of distributed practice for sustainable teaching and learning, quiz tools are recommended: quizzing in the classroom with an audience response system (ARS) and self-quizzing at home with flashcards to be learned according to the repetition intervals of Leitner or Woźniak.

With the ARSnova open-source software project at THM, a mobile browser-based flashcard app has been developed in recent years that supports distributed learning on the go and in the classroom: https://arsnova.cards. The card format and the number of virtual card sides were adapted to the study-specific contents and requirements, e.g. card types for lecture notes, learning units, glossaries, commands from programming languages, formula collections, design patterns, exercises, exam questions, quotations, subject bibliographies, and vocabularies. There is also a presentation card type optimized for projectors that allows presentations to be held using arsnova.cards instead of PowerPoint or Keynote. The gamified audience response system https://arsnova.click described in an EDULEARN17 article is embedded in the flashcard app. It can be accessed at any time without leaving the browser.

arsnova.cards is not a traditional flashcard app like Quizlet or SuperMemo. Because it not only supports the learning of study contents with digital index cards, but also the revision and learning of lecture notes. The app is designed as a mobile Personal Learning Environment (PLE), a virtual place where learning time is intensively used for cognitive activities such as reworking transcripts, creating learning cards and repeatedly answering learning questions. In contrast, learning management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard or Moodle are used in practice only as a platform for the distribution of scripts. The concept of arsnova.cards enables the teacher to evaluate the learning process of the students in order to award bonus points for taking and reworking lecture notes and for repeated card learning during the course of the semester.

The article focuses on the conceptual and technical measures to sustainably promote mobile learning with flashcards. We show how usability and user experience (UX) of a mobile browser-based learning tool can be increased and how the increase can be measured objectively. In addition to "Ease of Use", the "Joy of Use" is a decisive intrinsic motivation for the long-term use of a mobile app. We describe the evaluated measures in best-practice form in order to enable a transfer to the development of other mobile browser-based teaching and learning tools.

Keywords:

Mobile learning, distributed learning, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, user experience, bonus awarding, flashcard, Personal Learning Environment.