Abstract:

Portuguese universities are currently facing major challenges. Sequential reforms have contributed to increase student numbers and graduation rates, but institutions need to attract and recruit even more students, meeting their needs and those of the labour market, as well as the expectations of those students looking for them. The COVID19 pandemic brought additional challenges, imposing the use of online teaching/assessment methodologies and triggering the need for a deep reflection on the future of education. The academic paths, motivations and expectations of students can be as diverse as individuals and necessarily represent different educational challenges for educational institutions. The mission of a university is not only to confer a certification, but also to look for solutions that avoid academic demotivation, frustration and abandonment.

Students often use mobile devices in the classroom for purposes unrelated to class activities, which add distraction and interfere with the teaching and learning processes. Given their enthusiasm and dependence on technologies and on digital, the use of this type of tools and resources has been proposed to promote learning, which now appears practically unavoidable if educational institutions and their professionals intend to modernize and improve their teaching/learning processes. Several published works highlight the significant contribution of technological innovations in solving educational challenges and the impact on learning success, mainly through the involvement, motivation and participation of students, in various scientific areas (Caldwell 2007; Cain & Robinson 2008; Wan, et al 2017).

ARS, also called audience response systems, are systems of questions asked to an audience in an event where responses are recorded in real time and where it is possible to monitor and quantify the correct responses of the entire audience. These systems have become popular for their use in television contests such as the North American version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". For the availability of questions and recording and quantification of answers, these systems depend on specific software and hardware (Barber and Njus, 2007; Caldwell 2007) with resources available on the internet, such as Mentimeter, which allow the use of mobile communication devices such as mobile phones, tablets or laptops. ARS has several features that favour its use in the classroom context to get a real-time reaction from students, assess knowledge, give and receive immediate feedback, capture students' attention, promote their involvement, increase student-students and student-teacher interactions, among others (DeBourgh GA 2007).

This work results from the interest in implementing the use of the Internet and mobile phones to increase participation in the classroom, using ARS to promote innovation and active teaching and learning. The application of ARS in the classroom for pedagogical purposes took place in the 2019-20 academic year, in four curricular units of four different degrees. The main features explored were quizzes, multiple choice questions, open answer questions and word clouds. Evidence was collected from the students through the application of a questionnaire, which sought to assess their perceptions about the pedagogical dimension of the use of ARS in the classroom and their satisfaction with the experience, presenting the results obtained in this work.

Keywords:

ARS, mobile devices, teaching &amp, learning, engagement motivation.