Active Slides: Facilitating Instructor-Student In-Class Communication
Background: This was the project for an independent study in my senior year. It was my first project with a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) flavor, which jumpstarted my interest in HCI and user experience. I worked with two classmates of mine to design a presentation system to facilitate instructor-student communication in class.
I implemented the student-facing web interface and also the server-side service that channel students' feedback to the instructor interface. I got to deploy the system to an undergraduate Python programming course for one lecture and observed how the interaction between the students and the instructor change with the new system.
My role(s): Developer
Collaborator(s): Jen-Hao Chen, Li-Shan Wang
Motivation: Students are sometimes shy in expressing their difficulty in understanding course content. This leaves the teacher unaware of the problem and creates a gap of understanding between teachers and students in a class.
Problem Solving: I led a team to build “Active Slides,” a platform that encouraged more communication and made the education process more interesting as it happened in class. By allowing students to add some visual effects to the slides, students were able to provide feedback collaboratively as a group for the instructor, and also created a shared understanding of how learning materials (i.e., slides) were perceived by fellow learners.
Brainstorming Features
Development
Expert Feedback
2 college professors
Revision
Fieled Testing
A Python programming class
Outcomes: Initial results of the field testing showed that
- The application stimulates short pauses for Q&A: students were able to provide implicit feedback that caught the attention of the instructor, which resulted in pauses of the lecture and creating time for Q&A.
- Students enjoy it, maybe a bit too much.: students enjoyed using the application, and even start having fun with the application's painting capability to draw interesting figures.
The outcomes of this project include a web-based client that allows students to view slides and submit feedback, and a desktop software for instructors to import and present their slides and receive students feedback in real-time.
Summary:
Date: 2006 Spring
