Class Discussion Management and Analysis Application

Abstract

Discussion-based teaching is popular in several courses because it creates opportunities for students to practice important skills useful for the working environment. In order to make this pedagogy impactful and effective, instructors employ technologies such as online discussion forums and student response systems to conduct and manage classroom discussions. More recently mobile devices have become prevalent and researchers have been exploring how this device can help support education. In this paper we report the innovative use of mobile technology and supporting backend tools to manage classroom discussions. We have implemented a class discussion and management application, LiveClass. This application records the audio of utterances during the classroom discussion which is then converted into text and stored in a data store. The stored information is used to help efficiently grade the class participation, and provide deeper insights to both students and instructor. The analysis of the insights are intended to provide opportunity to the faculty to further improve student learning experience. To evaluate the effectiveness of the LiveClass application, we conducted a pilot run of a case study discussion in a controlled classroom environment. Our experiments enabled us to discover the gaps in the application and identify areas for improvement.