Dr. Ashkenazi is at the Dept of Science teaching. He spoke of 2 major models for audience interaction. Both of them use the "Active Learning" approach- which states that when a student is asked to actively engage in problem solving and discussion, they will retain more information and have a better understanding of the material than when regular frontal teaching is used.

Group Based Work:

In this model, students sit around circular tables. 2-3 students sit around every computer- this is important, if a person has his own computer- no group dynamics will evolve. In this setting they are given questions which force them to use their existing knowledge to find answers to questions they don't know. Thus they need to explore, use computer based tools (statistics, simulations, reference material, etc), and use group discussions to solve a problem. A group can be the 2-3 people sitting around a single computer, or a whole table of people with 3 computers. Thus, the discussion dynamics can be internal to the group, or between groups. At the end of the process they upload their answer and the lecturer can see the answer statistics.

Frontal Lecture Interactive Engagement:

In this model, students sit in an auditorium with seats organized in rows. This does not enable intimate group work as in the previous model. At most, you can allow students to talk to their immediate neighbors. Questions are mostly multiple-choice within a specific time allocation. The students answer by using infra-red input devices (EduCue, $30 per device, plus $200+ per receiver) which allow them to enter two dimensions: an answer (either a multiple choice designator, or a number) and a confidence level. The devices can be signed out to students for the duration of the course, and also serve as attendance monitors. A management application on the lecturer computer enables inputting questions, timing, and seeing answer histograms. Guy says that he uses PowerPoint to create questions slides since they enable him to use illustrations and other media types in the questions he poses to the students. He only uses the management application to show the timing window on the side of the screen.

He talks about some technical problems with the system: Since the receiver takes a tenth of a second to deal with every device beamed at it a serious bottle neck develops. This can cause some input to be lost. One solution is to use more than one receiver for different parts of the class, but because their Ir signal is strong, one device can be received by more than one receiver. Because of this, they need to place blinders on the receivers to minimize their field of view and the possible crosstalk. So- even though these are personal answer devices, the accuracy is not seen as 100%. I think this is an important point for us- whatever system we use should not suffer these types of problems. Solutions? Will using a faster medium (i.e. RF) solve these problems, or will we simply have a bottle neck at faster speeds?

Initial Conclusions (Please update and comment)

1. Even small classrooms can utilize the "Active Learning" approach. According to Guy- research shows that learning effectiveness is twice as high with these models when compared to regular frontal lectures.
2. Audience input devices are not cheap- this may enable us to develop a better system for comparable costs. ($30 + number of receivers * ($200 / the number of seats ) per seat)
3. To make such a system cost effective- its accuracy must be substantially higher than the cheaper "Hands up" model.
4. We need to keep in mind the usage scenarios and pedagogical models for using audience feedback. We have discrete input (multiple-choice, yes/no) which allows for one form of interaction, and free input (i.e. a number, some text maybe?) which can enable additional forms of interaction.
5. Lecturer preparation should be very easy- with the system Guy is using, the lecturer must create the questions, input them into the management application and download them over serial cable to the receivers. I would like to see this process being almost invisible to the lecturer. i.e. I would like them to be able to update their questions and have them seamlessly updated in the system- ready to go, no wires and hardware to hook up and update.

Amnon