Abstract:

In the last decades, the use of technical tools has proven to be beneficial to solve problems occurring in university lectures, e.g., the lack of interaction between the lecturer and the students, or the fear to ask questions in front of a large audience. Therefore, a variety of approaches were developed, such as Audience Response Systems that allow to involve students actively by enabling them to answer questions, or Backchannel Systems that are used to discuss questions in the background of the lecture. However, current systems are targeted to support specific teaching scenarios and thus, often cannot be adapted to others. This results in lecturers having to combine multiple systems to implement their preferred teaching scenario, or even adjust it to match the currently used system(s).

With stARS (scenario-tailored Audience Response System), the approach of an adaptable learning environment was presented that allows lecturers to use technical tools in complex teaching scenarios (Kubica et al., 2020). Therefore, a graphical editor is used to enable lecturers to model and execute their scenarios as customized workflows, which consists of both elements to represent the lecture and interactive activities. In addition to common activities, stARS supports group- and peer interactions, such as forming groups of students based on the results of previous questions and subsequent discussions in virtual chat rooms. Moreover, each element defines a variety of parameters that allows to customize it even further.

In order to reason about lecturers' perceptions of using stARS to support digital teaching scenarios, this paper presents the results of two user studies that were carried out over the last months. The first was conducted in virtual live sessions with lecturers in order to check their ability to use the graphical editor to model complex teaching scenarios. The other was designed as a questionnaire, in which lecturers were asked on the one hand to choose useful functions for learning environments as well as teaching scenarios they would like to use more often or support technically, and on the other hand to rate exemplary models of five well-known teaching scenarios (e.g., Peer Instruction, Jigsaw Classroom or Think-Pair-Share) regarding their comprehensibility. Both user studies were conducted with 20 lecturers with varying prior knowledge in both teaching itself and using technical tools.

The user studies were able to prove that lecturers are capable of using the graphical editor of stARS and provided evidence that the activities included (e.g., group- and peer interactions) are demanded by lecturers in order to use complex teaching scenarios more often. For example, 12 out of 20 lecturers responded that they would like to use Peer Instruction more frequently in their lectures. Furthermore, the user studies provided valuable feedback that was integrated in the prototype. Currently, several complex teaching scenarios are implemented in real lectures.

References:
[1] Kubica, T., Shmelkin, I., Peine, R., Roszko, L., & Schill, A. (2020). stARS: Proposing an Adaptable Collaborative Learning Environment to Support Communication in the Classroom. In CSEDU (pp. 390-397).

Keywords:

Technology-enhanced learning, audience response systems, backchannel systems, teaching scenarios, peer instruction, jigsaw classroom, think pair share.