Abstract:

At many universities, some student response systems – often called clicker – are used. Clickers enable teachers to pose questions to students and immediately collect and view the responses of the entire class. Most of the clickers are appropriate technology to deal with multiple-choice questions and require the usage of specific remote transmitters. The system instantly collects the student’s answers and the teacher can view, save, or display the results anonymously for the entire class to see.

At the Stuttgart Media University, this idea is being further developed: LeMon (Lecture Monitoring) is an approach which transfers the clicker idea to be used on student’s own devices. Beside this, it extends the question possibilities by using multiple choice, free text and enumeration questions.

Using LeMon, the teacher has the possibility to check the level of knowledge of his students – even having several hundreds of students in his course. At the beginning of each lecture, the teacher displays a QR code on the screen. Scanning this QR code using a smartphone, the students get to a questionnaire. There, they can answer test questions about the lecture content anonymously. All answers are collected, saved and evaluated online. After this, the answers and their evaluation are shown right after the test to all participants in the lecture hall on the screen. Thus both, the teacher and all participants get an instant overview of their current knowledge. Beside this, every student can see and compare the sample answers to the questions on his own smartphone.

Hence, the teachers get the possibility to know the level of knowledge of his students, even with very large courses. This gives him the opportunity to respond better to the needs of his audience and adapt the speed and the depth of his lecture accordingly.

But also the students see their own lacks of knowledge immediately know which part of the lecture they should repeat again.

In the proposed paper, the system is described in more details. Beside this, first practical experiences made during the lecturers are presented.