Increasing Interactivity in Large Blended Classrooms through a Cutting-Edge Mobile Learning System

Abstract

Large classrooms, whether on school grounds or online, have long suffered from a lack of interactivity. Many online classes simply provide recorded instructor lectures, which only reinforces the negative effects of passive non-participatory learning. The E-Learning Lab of Shanghai Jiaotong University developed a cutting-edge mobile learning system that can deliver live broadcasts of real-time classroom teaching or training to learners with mobile devices. Their system allows learners to customize means of content-reception, based on when and where they tune into the broadcast. The system also supports short text-messaging and instant polls. Through these venues, learners can interact with the instructor and class mates in real time. This paper describes this system in detail, and also report results from a test implementation of the system with two blended classrooms of more than 1000 learners.