Mobile Quiz Apps Engage College Students

When associate professor Elliott Currie started posting lectures online, attendance in his management accounting class dropped immediately.

Because the lectures were online, the students didn't bother to come to class at the University of Guelph in Ontario. 

Currie wanted to find a way to engage his students on a regular basis and show them the value of class time. He had used clickers before, but wanted more than a yes-no or multiple choice answer. And he didn't want students to cheat by giving their clickers to someone else.

Like Currie, professors in the United States and Canada search for ways to engage their students. And they've found potential in mobile quiz applications.
 

Provide value to students

Because mobile devices are so prevalent on campus, Currie started using an application called monacleCAT this semester. During class, he asks questions through the app that require numerical, alpha or combinations of responses. That way he can get them involved and see whether they understand the concepts he's teaching.

“By having them do work regularly in class, then there’s a value to coming to class, there’s a value to paying attention,” Currie said. “By doing this, the students are not left just hanging there on a one-way system of receiving information. They actually are doing something — they are interacting at least with the material in the class that we’re teaching.”

The students pay $20 per term for the app — which they can use in any class — and they've told Currie that they like it. They don't have to carry around anything extra and can use familiar technology including texting.
 

Encourage collaboration

Currie makes the quizzes 10 percent of the students' grade to make it worthwhile for them. Out of 560 students in his class, only one student didn't have a mobile device, and he took care of the issue by dividing that student's final grade by .90.

During class, Currie gives students 5 minutes to work on a problem with the person next to them. By working with a partner, they can learn from each other and bring different perspectives to the question.

“If you can teach something, that means you must know it very well,” he said.

And by teaching each other, they reinforce their learning, test their knowledge and participate in a valuable academic exercise.

When Currie puts a question into the application, he completes part a and b of the problem in front of the class. The students do part c. But in order to complete part c, they have to pay attention to the first two parts.

Since he started using the app, attendance has jumped 50 percent, and his students are engaged in class.
 

Address challenges

In fall 2009, students in professor Klara Nahrstedt's distributed systems course created distributed applications on the Google Android development platform. The class from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign bundled the apps into a mi-clicker app that provides quizzes, announcements, text messages and voice recording.

Since spring 2010, university classes have been testing the app, which is part of the university's Mobile Learning Communities project. The project enables students to share education services through Google phones, iPhones and other mobile devices.

Thanks to gifts from Google and Vodafone as well as National Science Foundation grants, the Computer Science Department provided more than 100 phones for classes to use during the semester.

The phones have two missions:

1. To teach students about programming the phones, including operating systems and languages.

2. To increase interactivity between students and instructors through educational applications.

But before the phones can be used more frequently, the university has to overcome infrastructure issues. Because the test classes only had two wireless access points, students didn't have enough wireless access and used the app on a limited basis.

“These mobile phones are such a bleeding edge technology that many of these wi-fi infrastructures are not set up for phones," Nahrstedt said.

Experiment with curriculum

As classes test the app this academic year, instructors are learning how it fits into their classes.

“The quiz application has been used a few times," Nahrstedt said, "but the instructors basically pointed out that one has to more carefully think about how to include the phone technology into the curriculum.”

To make the quiz application a permanent part of the curriculum, the quiz goals need to be clearly defined, she said.

The quizzes have the potential to show professors whether students understand the material they're teaching. Depending on the results, professors can change their instruction on the fly by repeating information the students missed or adding more examples.

The students would like to vote during the class if the professor is moving too fast or too slow. In the spring semester, Nahrstedt's class will think about enabling that kind of function and testing it in a larger class of 20 to 40 students.

If professors do give that kind of feature to students, it does change direction of classes, she said.

“We need to experiment then with the learning and educational methods of how to bring these phones as viable tools in education.”

Resources:

Exploring Social Trust in Mobile Learning Environments