Abstract:

Teaching in the early bachelor’s degrees at the university often comes down to classical ex cathedra courses for which the students take a passive role leading progressively to the lost of their motivation which may result in school failure.

In this work, we demonstrate that the use of a collaborative social bookmarking, such as Diigo, can help for preserving and promoting the student motivation within large classes. Diigo, a free online tool, is used in a bachelor class of Bio Engineering (270 students) at the Gembloux Agro Bio Tech Faculty (University of Liege, Belgium), in order to allow students to work actively in small groups (6 students). During this activity the students prepare themselves the subject of the course, supervised by a tutor who is also a teacher.

The impacts of this learning activity are clear: the motivation is substantially increased and the teacher can assist each group in its research through the Network, rather than merely transmit his knowledge to a large audience without close interactions with the students.

Keywords:

Diigo, Motivation, Collaborative Work, large classes, Bachelor classes.