Promoting active learning in large classrooms: Going beyond the clicker

Abstract

Teaching and learning in most current university lectures has remained unchanged for centuries and nowadays, large lecture classes are a fact at universities. Technologies such as Classroom Response Systems have been designed to ease the adoption of new pedagogical practice in these contexts; however, these pose technological, economic and pedagogical limitations to teachers, students and institutions. In this paper, we present a feasibility study of a system that allows students to take snapshots of paper-based, handwritten solutions to a given task with their devices, and then converts this input to vector graphics that are automatically hosted in a cloud-based storage service, such as Google Drive. The teacher can then discuss students’ solutions and provide elaborate formative feedback in class. We report on the findings of a feasibility study with engineering students in Chile, which validate the practicality of the approach. After this validation we plan to integrate optical character recognition capabilities in the system, in order to support programming and physics education.