Intelligent Systems Research Group
SmartClassroom
Enrich university courses with a smartphone based toolkit and thereby improve classroom-interaction, include reserved students and guide lecturers for systematic lecture improvement.
Team:
Prof. Dr. Astrid Laubenheimer,
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bröckl,
Johannes Dornheim
Funding: Internal
Duration: 2014 - 2016
Overview
The Projekt “SmartClassroom” started in late 2014 and is internally funded by Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. The project goal is to enrich university courses with a smartphone based toolkit and thereby improve classroom-interaction, include reserved students and guide lecturers for systematic lecture improvement.
The first part of the planned SmartClassroom toolkit consists of a special Ad-Hoc Classroom Response System (CRS). Conventional CR systems enable lecturers to raise prepared closed-ended questions. Students can choose their answer by pressing a button on the CRS-clicker or -smartphone app. Afterwards the given answers are visualized in form of a bar chart for further discussion. This conventional form of Classroom Response Systems is limited to prepared closed-ended questions and is thereby lacking in flexibility and the opportunity for lecturers to raise questions spontaneously based on the given classroom situation. SmartClassroom Ad-Hoc Questions are an alternative approach, which enables the lecturers to raise spontaneously closed-ended or open-ended questions. Instead of choosing one answer from a list, students answer in form of free text input and, after a statistic and semantic analysis, the given answer-set is visualized depending on the underlying structure.
The second contribution of SmartClassroom is a smartphone based realtime- and long-term-feedback system. Students are able to dispatch live-feedback messages during class, which then are filtered and weighted to avoid misuse and afterwards visualized on the lecturers screen. Live-Feedback messages are discrete messages regarding the perception (e.g. “The lecturer is too quiet!”) or the comprehension (e.g. “I understand absolutely nothing!”) of the lecture. After the lecture students can submit feedback affecting the whole lecture. This post-feedback, together with the aggregation of live-feedback messages, and if available, feedback of previous semesters, is then submitted to the lecturer in form of reports for purposeful lecture quality improvement.
In addition to the manual feedback opportunities, a part of the research project is a sensor-based classification system, which will enrich the feedback data with additional information about the classroom situation which will lead to more valuable lecturer-reports.
Research and development regarding the project is taking place at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Astrid Laubenheimer, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bröckl and Johannes Dornheim. Computer Science Students of Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences are playing an active role in various areas of the SmartClassroom-project as part of their studies in form of practice-based projects.
Partners & Funding
