Towards a Collaborative Classroom through Shared Workspaces on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Student disengagement in lectures is a global issue in higher education. Our approach is to apply a studentcentred collaborative learning pedagogy into classrooms through a mobile real-time collaborative notetaking application GroupNotes, which allows a small self-selecting group of students to proactively keep each other engaged without requiring the lecturer to change the existing pedagogy. This paper presents the design principles behind the application interface, which enables students to follow principles identified as good practice in undergraduate education while still allowing for the individual to contribute and interact with regard to their own ability and preferred learning style. It provides an individual workspace to each group member, which is shared with and may be viewed and edited by other members in real time. The preliminary test results show that students are more engaged in the lecture with collaborative than with individual notetaking and more satisfied with sharing individual workspaces than with sharing a common workspace.

Affiliations

School of Computer Science, Engineering and

Mathematics, Flinders University

Adelaide, Australia

HIT Lab Australia

University of Tasmania

Launceston, Australia

Contributors

Mark Reilly

Haifeng Shen

Paul Calder

Henry Duh

Conference

Publication date: September 2014

Publication date (Print): September 2014

Pages: 335-340

ID: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2014.54

Copyright statement: © Mark Reilly et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings of the 28th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2014), Southport, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of the 28th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2014)

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 28

Conference location: Southport, UK

Conference date: 9 - 12 September 2014

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2014)

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2014.54

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing