Using smartphone technology to help improve the interactivity, engagement and the learning experience of students in the traditional lecture environment

Abstract

More and more educational establishments are looking to integrate new and newer technologies into their learning environments to help support student learning. The eager take up of these systems by management within Higher Education has placed teaching and learning staff in the vanguard of being expected to take up, understand and drive the use of these technologies often without the consequences on student learning having been thoroughly researched.This paper investigates the effect two technologies, Quick Response Codes and Automatic Response Systems, have on helping improve the engagement of students within the traditional lecture environment and describes our experiences and rationale for moving from the first towards the second.With smartphone technology becoming almost ever-present in most education settings we developed a conceptual framework, BACDE, (pronounced ‘based’) that allows a variety of different types of multiple choice questions to be displayed and answered using a smartphone device. All responses can be instantly summarised and displayed in chart form and are then discussed and evaluated jointly by the instructor and class using an in-house web application called Qubed, (Q3), that caters for Questions, Questionnaires and Quizzes.This research suggests that this is a highly flexible approach that has allowed us to easily migrate from using QR codes to using the latest interactive version of our web application and appears to be an engaging way of improving formative feedback to students and in helping support and enhance their learning experiences