Abstract:

This paper introduces an innovative customised interaction tool in lectures in order to enhance effective interaction between lecturers and students. This work was designed for the Joint Programme (JP) students between Queen Mary, University of London and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications [1].

Interaction between lecturers and students has always been an important factor in students learning experience and studies have shown that interactive students are more actively engaged in learning [2]. However, due to the large class size (120 – 180 students) on the JP and the “shy” nature of students, it has been difficult for lecturers to interact with students directly in the classroom.

An innovative solution that makes use of web technology was proposed to enhance interaction during lectures. A customised website was created with the functions of online quiz and online forum. For online quiz function, a lecturer is able to design and create a quiz on the website in advance. The lecturer can then make the quiz available during the lecture for students to answer using their mobile devices (mobile phone, tablets or laptops). The quiz can then be disabled so no new answers will be submitted. The lecturer can view real-time results (including option counts and correct rates) of students’ choices to quiz questions and use them to analyse students understanding on a certain knowledge area. All created quiz questions will be stored in a question bank for further reuse, and created quizzes can be reused for different lecture group.

When enabled, the online forum function support anonymous questions from students during a lecture, and a lecturer can see what questions were asked by students and give answers to the whole class immediately, thus solving the problem of students unwilling to ask questions in the class due to shyness.
The website is deployed on local Alibaba cloud servers in China. This gives advantages over other online survey website such as Survey Monkey in terms of fast access and response speed, which is vital for online-quiz function.

At the time of writing this abstract, initial user acceptance tests of the website and functions have been carried out. While it is demonstrated to be an effective tool to help interaction between students and lecturers in the classroom, improvement areas have also been identified. Future work aims to fix application bugs and the system will be tested further to evaluate its effectiveness on students’ interaction and performances.

References:
[1] L. Cuthbert, N. Yao, B. Chib, Y. Ying and Y. Wang, “A Success Story in Inter-Disciplinary, Inter-Continental Engineering Education” in Proceedings of IEEE conference of Transforming Engineering Education: Creating Interdisciplinary Skills for Complex Global Environments, Dublin, Ireland, April 2010.
[2] M. C. Wang, G. D. Haertel, H. J. Walberg, "What influences learning? A content analysis of review literature", Journal of Educational Research, vol. 84, no. 1, pp. 30-43, 1990.

Keywords:

Effective interaction, technology in teaching and learning, unconventional interaction in the classroom, higher education.