About LectureTools
It is conceivable that over the next ten years we will approach a point when
all undergraduate students at all colleges and universities will
have access to some form of Internet-enabled device. These devices
will probably be far more powerful and contain far more functionality
than what is available today, but undoubtedly their affordances will
continue to include the capability to communicate, query and reflect.
The question is not a matter whether students will one day have these
devices. They will. The question whether the advantages they offer are greater than the potential for distraction they enable.
Mobile Internet-enabled technology allows real-time sharing of information between students and between students and instructors. Will these capabilities expand students’ ability to learn, or facilitate instruction by instructors, or allow the collection of new data that can inform our understanding of the cognitive process? Or, on the other hand, is it possible that these devices will simply overload students with information without support for organizing the content? Will their potential to provide near real-time feedback helpful or obfuscating? Can we expand, capture and assess reciprocal teaching and peer instruction more efficiently using technology or are we likely to inundate ourselves in discourse? LectureTools is a technical framework in which to test these question and, second, a pedagogical framework in which strategies for implementation can be developed and tested.
LectureTools began as a framework to research new methods for expanding class discourse by engaging students in text-based, image-based and simulation based responder questions. The original intention was to develop a web-based student response system (SRS). However, as students and instructors used LectureTools they offered ideas for how it could be made more useful and easier to use. The system evolved rapidly through ad hoc trials coupled with rapid prototyping. Nonetheless, while development may not have contained the systemic testing demanded of professional systems it uniquely represented a collaborative design process between instructors and students where the developing instructors, for better or worse, lived with the successes and failures as they taught their classes.
LectureTools provides a range of student response options plus it allows students to
- Take notes synchronized to lecture slides,
- Draw on and save the instructor’s lecture slides,
- Pose clarifying questions that can be answered asynchronously during class or after class and
- Self-assess their understanding during lecture.
For more information contact Prof. Perry Samson.