QTvity: advancing students' engagement during lectures by using mobile devices

Abstract

Our aim was to motivate and support more active student-teacher collaboration by using the students' mobile devices in class activities. We designed a mobile application called QTvity that can be used by the lecturer to prepare questions related to the lecture contents. During the lectures, the application allows the lecturer to interactively display each question on the students' mobile devices and to designate the time period in which the students can submit their answers. The answers are then projected on the screen and discussed by the lecturer and students. Our experience of using QTvity indicates that the majority of students accept it as a motivating challenge, especially when their participation is stimulated with additional scoring that can improve their final grades. Among many benefits of such lectures compared to traditional ones we found out that the students not only pay more attention to the topics discussed during the lectures, but also tend to use their devices less for other distracting purposes (e.g. browsing social networks and writing messages to their friends). While both students and lecturers reported about improved student-teacher interaction, students appreciated also better peer-to-peer communication in the learning process. Analysis of students' feed-back revealed some subtle issues that contribute to better understanding of students' behaviour and indicate directions for further improvements of the system.