Abstract:

In a classroom, it is often difficult to get students involved in the discussion, both with peers and the teachers. This also means that students rarely can raise their voice, discuss, or enhance their analytical and social skills in an academic environment. There have been many initiatives to overcome this challenge. Educational technology and collaborative work are amongst these, and both have proven to be effective. Educational technology has the advantages of involving students, raising engagement and motivation, enhancing peer learning, and ensuring easy diagnosis for the student groups when used correctly. It also provides the lecturer with possibilities of facilitating the usage of EdTech, gives immediate feedback to the group, and it should be easy to integrate into existing lectures. Collaborative work has the advantages of enhancing social skills, redirecting educational and social strategic goals for the students, and improving the learning environment. The newly launched EU co-funded project iLikeIT2 wants to combine all these advantages and develop an online application with appropriate methodological guidelines that enables lecturers to organize students easily and time-efficiently into groups and receive responses from all participating students. The students will discuss the teacher’s task with peers and try to agree upon a solution. This answer will, in turn, be submitted and the object of plenary discussions facilitated by the teacher. iLikeIt2 will be a variation of the traditional group work, where anonymity and written language will be emphasized more than physical contact and verbal expressions.

Even if the project especially targets Higher Education Institutions, mainly because the challenges with collaborative work are greater when there are larger groups and a conservative academic tradition, it will be developed universal methodology and tools that can easily be adapted to other educational and entrepreneurial sectors.

The project will produce real results that can be used and implemented directly during and after the project’s end. The main results will be a functioning prototype of a response tool that will include randomizing groups, requesting feedback, and manipulating results directly after the voting ends. The development will include technical specifications and an adoption strategy to disseminate further and maintain the results. However, technology is nothing without methodology, and the consortium will direct their main effort towards making guidelines and a pedagogical strategy for making the software useful for teachers and students, and anchor the results directly via seminars and instructor trainings throughout and after the projects end.

This paper will introduce the project and its expected outputs. It will provide frameworks for collaborative work and possible ways of programming the software. The paper will also investigate the resources needed for making response technology a success in the classroom.

Keywords:

Innovation, Educational Technology, research projects, response tools.