Classroom Communicator
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The Classroom Communicator is a system designed to allow students and instructors to communicate more effectively in classroom learning environments. One of our initial goals was to provide a system that allowed instructors to have 100% classroom participation from students when questions were posed. One of the methods we are using is a Collaborative Learning system popularized by Professor Eric Mazur of Harvard University called Peer Instruction. In this system, instructors pose a question to the students in the class. The students can enter their multiple choice answers on one of our supported devices (PCs, handhelds or cell phones). At the end of the question period, a histogram of answers is shown to the class. If the instructor feels there is no consensus on a single answer, students are asked to convince their neighbors of their answer. Upon asking students to enter their answers again, it is the hope that a consensus would be formed by allowing students to speak to one another.
The Classroom Communicator expands upon the Peer Instruction system by providing mechanisms for students to collaborate with students who may not be seated next to them in class. Our rational for this feature is that the traditional Peer Instruction system can not guarantee that students seated next to each other will have different answers. It is our hypothesis that the Peer Instruction system works best when students with the correct answers are paired with students with incorrect answers. Upon gathering all answers entered by the students, our system seeks to find the best class pairings that has the highest likely-hood of changing incorrect answers into correct answers. In the collaboration phase, students use real-time chat, video, audio, whiteboard and other collaboration tools to convince their 'virtual neighbor' of their answer. The instructor can join any student group and step through the conversation. Advice can be given electronically by the instructor to students who are not converging upon the correct answer. At the end of the collaboration phase, the students enter their answers again. We plan to report our findings on the different pairing heuristics we designed and collaboration tools we found effective.
Another goal of the Classroom Communicator was to provide the data captured during class as a study-aid for students and teaching evaluation tool for instructors. Our vision is for students to use the system to review questions and explanations received by other students. By reviewing explanations by other students, we believe our system would enable students to see explanations from different points of view. Our vision is for instructors to use the system to gain insight on what topics confused students most. This off-line data is provided through a web-interface for easy access for students and instructors.
