Facilitating collaborative learning in innovation practice oriented courses utilizing mobile internet platforms

Innovation practice oriented computing courses have become very popular in China's universities in recent years. Students are encouraged to propose and implement their own innovative ideas in the form of team projects. It is a challenge for undergraduates to carry out a project of innovation, paricularly when they cannot get timely instruction from teachers after class. In this poster, we argue that collaborative learning is an effective approach to promote students' innovation activities after class and online platforms play an important role. To this end, we propose a strategy of flexibly combining multiple mobile Internet platforms, such as WeChat, WizNote, Rain Classroom et al., to facilitate collaborative learning. These platforms enable the students to contribute to projects and learn from each other efficiently. Comparative experiments are conducted among one class that adopts the platform combination strategy (PC-class) and other three classes that adopt a simpler but more popular WeChat-only strategy (WO-classes). Survey results show that the students in the PC-class benefit more from collaborative learning and are more initiative to partipate in the project implementation. Consistently, the ratio of the projects that are implemented successfully, e.g., presented with a working prototype system or recognized by field experts, is higher in the PC-class.