Project DreamPad

Part 2: Initial prototype and evaluation plan

Winter Quarter 1996

DreamPad Team: Domg Mei Kevin Mobley Bob Waters

Project Description

Problem Statement

• Teachers may not realize that students are not responding well to class material. Often professors may not understand what material needs further clarification or what is the appropriate amount of attention to devote to a particular concept or problem. Students in the social context of the classroom may not want to orally question a concept the teacher is presenting either because of peer pressure, culture norms or intimidation.
• Professors also face a second issue: the development of the optimal presentation flow. It is tantamount that Professors exercise effective time management during a lecture to insure the retention of students' attention. In many cases, students drift away for the lecture when the professor lingers too long on a concept or subset of the material.
• Finally, professors have trouble identifying the slides that students have fully comprehended and those which may need modification. Professors need such information, however it is not feasible for the professor to query each student during class on the effctiveness of each slide presented in class.
• Established feedback systems are oriented towards "end-of-quarter" evaluations and neglect issues that could potentially benefit current students.

Key Domain Concepts:

• Collaborative learning
• Classroom inquiry
• Lecture comprehension
• Course materiral reference

Tasks to be Supported

Monitor progress of class:

• Report how well are students following topics.
• Monitor the mood of the class (bored, excited ...).

Monitor comprehension of slides:

• Analyze how well students understand this subset of class material
• Determine the number of student questions about a particular slide.

Ask questions:

• Allow questions to be taken without class disruption
• Allow apprehensive students to anonymously ask questions

Provide teacher feedback:

• Store class comprehension of class presentation
• Reveal which slide format achieved better class response
• Note what areas of the presentation need more emphasis

Project Goals

• Increase student comprehension of marterial
• Maintain an effective pace of presentation
• Afford refinement of individual slides and overall presentation
• Identify areas of student confusion
• Encourage full class participation--via anonymous questions, style reception and content comprehension feedback

Current state of the art

• Collaborative meeting software with anonymous brainstorming and opinon meter is the only commercial product currently providing similar anonymous and opinion services.
• The current CLASSPAD application provides some student notetaking and reference capabilities.

Design criteria

• The developed application should run on MS Windows 3.1 or above to maintain compatability with the existing CLASSPAD and LiveBoard prototype application.
• Data transmission should utilize the standard WINSOCK API to allow flexible interprogram communications. All Windows PC's that run net browsers will have a WINSOCK implementation.
• The developed application should provide anonymous feedback capabilities for the following areas:
  • Student overall mood (state of boredom etc.)
  • Student questioning
  • Student understanding of major topics
  • Student comprehension of material on a particular slide
• The student feedback should be correlated in some way to particular slides to give instructor's indication of slides that might be particularly complex and candidates for revision.
• Feedback should be provided in "real-time" so that instructors can dynamically act upon the information.
• Information should be archived so that instructors can review questions and opinions grouped by slide after class is over.

Description of new design

Our design incorporates both an instructor and a student module. Version 1.0 is the initial development from our storyboard. Version 1.1 contains revisions based upon instructor, TA and user comments. Version 1.2 is based on comments from our class presentation on 13 February where we conducted a GOMS analysis of the student interface.

• Prototype Design Document version 1.0
• Prototype Design, version 1.1
• Prototype Design, version 1.2

As you can see by following through the various designs, there is a tradeoff between some of the principles of the different evaluations. For instance we added feedback and the ability to "back out of a transaction" as a result of the heuristic eval to help error recovery by users. On the other hand, the GOMS analysis showed that this added unecessary keystrokes. Our compromise was to leave the dialog for novice users, and add pull-down menu support for expert users.

Description of design prototype

The design description is divided into 2 parts. The technical specification discusses the actual algorithms and design of version 1.0. The users guide provides instructions and troubleshooting ideas for users of the actual application.

• Technical Design Specifications
• Users Guide

Evaluation plan

Our evaluation plan is here.

Appendices