Shared note-taking: A Smartphone-based approach to increased student engagement in lectures

Mark Reilly School of Computer Science, Engineering & Mathematics

Flinders University Adelaide, South Australia m.reilly@flinders.edu.au

Haifeng Shen School of Computer Science, Engineering & Mathematics

Flinders University Adelaide, South Australia

haifeng.shen@flinders.edu.au

ABSTRACT The lecture is still the primary teaching and learning form in university and will remain so due to its cost-effectiveness. However, student disengagement caused by the traditional didactic style of lecture - with its one-way information flow allowing little or no interaction - prevents students from taking full advantage of this learning paradigm. Some work has been done to address this issue by re-designing lectures to incorporate more lecturer-and-student interaction, but has yet to be widely adopted. In this paper, we present a novel approach to applying a student-centered collaborative learning pedagogy into the lecture environment through a novel real-time collaborative note-taking application GroupNotes on Smartphones to let students voluntarily engage themselves by means of student-to-student interaction. Preliminary student feedback has shown that the approach is pedagogically and technically feasible and students are quite open to this approach due to its fun factor and peer motivation.

Keywords collaboration, Smartphones, education

INTRODUCTION The Lecture is still the primary teaching and learning paradigm in most universities, and is likely to remain so in the years to come. The most important benefit of the lecture to the university is its cost-effectiveness as a model of delivery to an audience ranging from tens to hundreds, and perhaps even thousands. It is also where the uniform delivery of information, not found in the standard texts, and also the possibility to motivate and inspire students exist [1]. The lecture format though is subject to many variables, e.g., the knowledge, structured delivery and presentation skills of the lecturer, the actual content to be delivered, the size, shape and acoustics of the venue and the facilities available to aid in content delivery, the level of student interaction encouraged, and the number of other students attending and their motivation for being there, and so on. First Page Copyright Notice Leave 2.5 cm (1") of blank space at the bottom of the left column of the first page for the copyright notice. Common to the majority of lectures is a didactic style of presentation where the lecturer delivers content to the

students in a one-way flow of information. Questions to the lecturer are generally not encouraged during the lecture as they would interrupt the information flow and may possibly put the lecture behind schedule, despite instant feedback being of most benefit to the students doing the asking, and presumably others in the audience as well. Instead, questions are postponed until the end of the lecture, or deferred until tutorial or practical sessions. The second avenue to obtaining quick feedback during the lecture is discussions between students however there is a real or implied prohibition on this as it may disrupt students in the vicinity. Students can only get the full benefits of the lecture if they are fully engaged however the traditional didactic style of lecture - with unidirectional flows and very little, or no, interaction between lecturer and students, and among students themselves - is the major cause of student disengagement [2]. A student will lose attention after approximately 20 minutes (10 – 15 minutes [3], [4]) unless something occurs to re-engage them. Research into addressing the student disengagement issue has been undertaken and suggestions such as re-designing lectures to incorporate more interactive content, like short quizzes, instant questions, or real-time voting, including support by electronic devices like clickers [5] or mobile phones [6]. These innovations have not been widely adopted; mainly due to the reluctance of lecturers who are not convinced of the benefits of delivering lectures in a drastically different way, or introducing new technology, or simply not having time to revamp their lectures. We want to address this issue from a different perspective by introducing collaborative learning, a student-centered learning pedagogy, into the lecture environment utilizing a Smartphone - the mobile communication device that most students either already own, or will in the near future. Our primary objective is to provide a platform which encourages student engagement in a lecture by allowing them to take notes during the session, and then share those notes either during, or after the session, with other group members. The taking of notes is proven to be an effective learning technique that aids memory of the lecture by fostering encoding, articulation and rehearsal [1]. What we propose is to allow a small group of students to participate in a real-time collaborative note-taking session using their

own Smartphones, where participants motivate, assist, and monitor each other in order to actively learn and keep themselves engaged during the lecture. In this paper, we present a technical approach that allows a small group of students to either cooperatively or collaboratively take notes of lecture content, review and rectify each other’s notes, comment on the lecture or notes, and ask or answer questions within the group all in real time during a lecture, or post lecture during a review, with nothing more than their everyday communication device – the Smartphone, and do so in a way that does not disrupt the lecture, either for the presenter, or for other students. We are currently in the process of designing and implementing such an application using an Android-based Smartphone by adopting the user-centered design methodology in order to maximize user acceptance and minimize student’s learning curve. Human factor study including user interface evaluation and usability study is ongoing, while pedagogical study including workload, cognitive load, engagement level, learning outcome, and usage scenarios will follow. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section describes the pedagogical background and the proposed approach. Then, we present a real-time collaborative note-taking application on Smartphone followed by its system architecture and some preliminary student feedback on the application. Finally, the paper is concluded with a summary of major contributions and future work.

PEDAGOGICAL BACKGROUND AND PROPOSED APPROACH A lecture is typically not interactive and will continue its didactic style of one-way information flow into the foreseeable future. In a lecture, the presenter, or content expert actively pushes information to a mass group of students, who passively process the information alone in an attempt to build the relevant knowledge for themselves. The lack of feedback or interaction, at the time when it is most needed for a student to process relevant information during a lecture is a major contributing factor to student disengagement, which consequently causes negative impacts on their willingness to attend lectures and on their learning outcome eventually. If a student cannot ask the lecturer [2] or their peers critical questions at the right time to reconcile their own understanding they may lose interest and find other ways to occupy themselves, such as doodling, sleeping, texting, twittering etc., or just getting up and leaving [7]. In addition, the attention span of an average student is approximately 20 minutes before their attention begins to wander. If the lecturer does not take special measures to engage students by, for instance, asking or answering questions, quick breakout sessions, quizzes, or simply telling a joke, their attention would wander in 20 minutes at most. If taking into account that approximately 50% of contact hours between students and teaching staff are

comprised of lectures, there is a real possibility that around 30% of all student contact hours are essentially wasted. In recent years, much attention has been paid to re-designing lectures in a bid to incorporate lecturer-and-student interaction (we call it vertical interaction) by taking advantage of new teaching gadgets such as clickers or mobile phones [8, 9]. Empirical evidence as to how student engagement can be improved by this approach as well as to their effectiveness in increasing student learning outcomes is yet to be proven [10]. More importantly, many lecturers have yet to be convinced of making extra efforts to re-design their lectures in order to harness these new technologies. Our approach is complementary to the current endeavor, but from an orthogonal perspective, i.e., student-to-student interaction (we call it horizontal interaction), which has been practiced in small-class tutorials, workshops, or practical sessions, but virtually prohibited in large-class lectures because it does not fit well in the lecture context and is likely to disrupt other students who are in the vicinity of students involved in the interaction. To make this approach viable in lectures, we specifically want to address the following issues. First, this approach is based on a student-centered collaborative learning pedagogy, which is proven effective in group-based learning tasks or activities in small classes. In a collaborative learning session, a small group of students work together towards the same learning objective or outcome, where one is given validation by one’s peers regarding their understanding of a particular idea or concept, or where they are introduced to ideas incompatible with their current understanding and are required to develop, based on discussion and negotiation between group members new meaning regarding these previously unknown, or misunderstood, concepts or beliefs [8] [11]. However, application of collaborative learning to large-class lectures is very much underexplored and we want to study its positive effect on improving student engagement and learning outcome and at the same time investigate any potential negative effect that may develop. Second, the proposed approach is also based on student active learning pedagogy, where students take a proactive role in engaging themselves rather than adopting a passive role in being kept engaged by the lecturer. Note-taking is an effective learning technique particularly in lectures, where students engage themselves to make sense of the lecture by documenting their understanding or misunderstanding of the information passed on by the lecturer in their initial knowledge building process. However, as note-taking is largely a personal choice rather than a curriculum requirement, students who do not take notes during a lecture may not be actively engaged in the lecture if there are no other means for them to engage themselves or be kept engaged by the lecturer. We want to investigate how to motivate students to proactively take notes in a more engaging and stimulating way.

Third, we want to address the issues responsible for the slow uptake of electronic hardware-based teaching innovations in lectures by investigating Smartphone-based horizontal interaction. This horizontal interaction does not require any change from either the presenter or the student if they do not want to, that is, the lecturer is not required to re-design lecture and the student is not forced to participate. It adds no extra burden to students, either monetary to purchase, time to learn, or effort to bring with, as an increasing number of students have already upgraded, or are considering upgrading to Smartphones which they carry with them always. In a nutshell, Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education [12] advocates developing reciprocity and cooperation among students, using active learning techniques, emphasizing time on task, and giving prompt feedback. While this is the idea from the teaching staff to the students, we aim to provide those same practices from each student in a collaborative group to the other members based on the hypothesis that the fun factor (e.g., Smartphone against paper-and-pen, collaborative learning against individual learning) and the peer pressure (e.g., the desire to help peers or not to let peers down) are the driving forces to keep students self-engaged in lectures. We need to systematically develop this technical approach and then test this hypothesis. Furthermore, for collaboration to be considered effective, the learning goals must be achieved and the collaborative process must include discussion and reflection [13], which in turn leads to deeper and more meaningful learning, We suggest the availability of this collaborative platform on Smartphones will promote the ability of the student to understand, analyze and evaluate lecture content, identified as three of the Six Cognitive Learning Outcomes for Undergraduate Education [14] and therefore achieve deeper understanding.

A REAL-TIME COLLABORATIVE NOTE-TAKING APPLICATION ON SMARTPHONES Saville-Smith suggested that handheld computers can assist students’ learning in a number of ways, including motivation, helping organizational skills, encouraging a sense of responsibility and supporting both independent and collaborative learning [15]. Milrad [6] identified useful features that mobile technologies provide for education in terms of social interactivity, individuality, connectivity and portability. Among those handheld devices and mobile technologies, some were particularly invented to engage students during lectures. However the difficulty in bringing them along to lectures, e.g., size and weight of the devices (for students), the workload in adopting and setting up them (for lecturers), the expense in owning them (for students), and the perceived benefits they can bring about (for both lecturers and students), have been seen as the major obstacles. For example, clickers and mobile phones were seen to be too limiting, although they were easy to carry and did not cost much, while PDA’s were too expensive for their limited functionality [16]. Tablets and laptops are seen to be too expensive, both to own and to operate (due to

limited space) in the lecture environment, although they have the potential to offer more benefits. Generally speaking, students were unwilling or unable to own the specific devices, bring them to lectures and invest in learning how to use the devices or applications such as Livenotes [8] and NoteBlogger [17]. The current power and sophistication of handheld computers, or converged devices - the Smartphones such as the Apple® iPhone™, Samsung® Galaxy S or HTC® Desire - are very attractive to the modern generation who expect instant information to be available to them whenever and wherever they are. IDC is now forecasting that sales of Smartphones will surpass that of traditional mobile phones by the end of 2010 (IDC 2010). Given that 98% of students have access to a mobile phone (Litchfield, Raban et al. 2009) and that phones are generally updated by their owners every two years (when out of contract) there is a reasonable assumption that the majority of the student body will have their own Smartphones within a few years. Research on using Smartphones for teaching and learning is emerging in recent years primarily because self-ownership and familiarity with their own devices, apart from their technical sophistication (e.g., computation power, screen size, storage, friendly and easy-to-use interface etc.) and portability, remove major obstacles to providing students viable technical solutions to their learning needs as evidenced with the recent introduction of “Hotseat” into Purdue University [18] and MLI at the University of Oulu [19]. We want to harness the unique characteristics of Smartphones to provide a viable technical solution to student disengagement problem in lectures and what this proposed solution differs from those already discussed is that it aims to tackle the issue from the perspective of students being kept engaged by their peers in a small virtual collaborative learning group (i.e., group members are not necessarily be physically seated together) within a large lecture audience, whereas the majority of existing work has focused on students being kept engaged by the lecturer through increased two-way vertical interaction. The cornerstone of the proposed solution is an application called GroupNotes, which will operate on Smartphones, providing for a small group of students to interact with each other through taking, reviewing, commentating, and questioning notes for lecture content as it is being delivered. The application is based on the observation that the speed of text entry available on a Smartphone through such innovations as on-screen soft keyboards like Swype® [20] and Swiftkey® [21], predictive text, predictive next word, auto complete, auto correct and the ability to copy and paste means that an experienced user can now ‘write’ even faster on a Smartphone than hand write with pen and paper (Figure 12), which alleviates the issues outlined by Ward [22] regarding the time involved in replicating the usual paper-and-pen notation methods onto electronic devices. In addition, the screen real estate of a Smartphone, typically ranging from 3.5 to 4.3 inch at the moment, is

reasonably good for a few users to be adding content to the display surface simultaneously if the application's user interface is properly designed. The application allows real-time collaboration within a small group of students to validate and explore the meaning of lecture content, as and when it is being delivered, yet in a silent manner that does not disrupt either the presenter or other students, which is the major driving force to keep every member engaged with the lecturer and their peers. The user interface design of the GroupNotes application is concerned about issues such as utilization of screen space, simplicity and ease-to-use, efficient use of key functions, unobtrusiveness of minor functions, user control and freedom, and awareness of group work. We adopted the user-centered design strategy in order to maximize user acceptance and minimize student’s learning curve. Therefore, we did a needs finding survey among students who were enrolled in the Mobile Applications topic (a fourth-year computer science topic) and 17 students responded to our survey. Survey results that helped our user interface design of the GroupNotes application are shown in Figures 1-6. User interface evaluation and usability study are currently ongoing. First, a group consists of maximally 4 students and the screen is equally divided into up to 4 notes areas, one for each student. This design is based on a typical Smartphone screen size of approximately 4 inch and the survey about the cognitive load involved in keeping up with the lecturer and other students in a group (Figure 1). The actual amount of screen space given to each student is dynamically adjusted according to the number of active students taking notes for a particular lecture slide as well as how much space each individual is requiring until all students are contributing equally and then the screen space is divided equally. When one’s note area is filled up, it can be scrolled up and down. Each individual is able to reallocate the amount of space on their own screen that is given to others in their group as required by flipping one’s notes area to maximize, minimize, or normalize it, which is to allow for maximum flexibility in allowing the students to use the application in a way that suits them. Second, while each member in a group usually works in their own notes area, it is very much possible that multiple members write to the same notes area, e.g., rectifying errors in a note or making comments on a note. Therefore, it is essential to clearly distinguish their contributions in the same notes area. In GroupNotes application, each member in a group is associated with a unique text color for self-identification as the survey shows that most students prefer using colours to differentiate group members to other ways in terms of the screen space consumption and the clarity of user identification (Figure 2). Background text color is used for highlighting purpose [23].

Figure 1: Maximum group size (excluding oneself) in terms of cognitive load to catch up with others

Figure 2: User identification mechanism within a group Third, notes are associated with each slide, but are not taken on the slide directly, mainly because: 1) the slide will fill up the entire screen space, making note-taking extremely difficult, 2) the current slide is projected on the wall, 3) notes will be reconciled into the slide automatically at the end of the lecture by the post-processing service (to be elaborated in the next section), and 4) a copy of the entire lecture slides can be downloaded to a one’s Smartphone and viewed by a separated application in the rare case where one needs to refer to a slide other than the current one. The design is backed up by the survey results shown in Figures 3-5.

Figure 3: Where should notes be taken?

Figure 4: How often is a different slide (not the one being projected on the wall) referred to?

Figure 5: Should copies of slides be available on the Smartphone for reference during a lecture?

Last, as suggested in the survey, diagram-drawing is only occasionally needed for a note-taking session (Figure 6).

Figure 6: How often is diagram-drawing needed in notes during a lecture?

Access to the drawing facility is supported in an unobtrusive way that: 1) the drawing toolbar is only made visible by tapping or flipping a notes area and hides automatically after the drawing task is done, and 2) diagrams are not inserted into a notes area as they would fill up the area, making note-taking difficult; instead, they are kept separate, but the notes maintains links to them so that they can be inserted into the right places of the notes automatically at the end of the lecture by the post-processing service. The user interface design should also allow for adequate user control and freedom, ranging from individual use to cooperative use and collaborative use, depending on how students wish to use their devices and the application at any given time.

Some students may only use GroupNotes on an individual basis, not as part of a group, purely for the benefit of getting the digital form of the notes. Although individual use is not the usage scenario we generally encourage students to take on, it does serve the purposes of engaging students in lectures and letting students in control of their own preferred learning styles that suit them best, let alone that students have a digital form of their own notes that can be used for after-lecture revision. Cooperative use of GroupNotes is where a student, though being part of a group, independently take notes for the entire lecture slides because they cannot manage the cognitive load involved in catching up with other members’ contributions while at the same time listening to the lecturer and taking their own notes, or only for a subset of the lecture slides (e.g., slides 1-5, odd slides etc.) to take on a fair share of the workload in the group. In this instance each member’s notes form part of the community notes [24] available to the group at the end of the lecture. Collaborative use of GroupNotes usually involves participants taking different roles in a real-time collaborative note-taking session in order to maximize each one’s strength and cognitive power. Figures 7 – 9 give an example involving a group of 4 students: Adam, Bruce, Carol and Deng, where Adam is designated as the note-taker, who takes notes for the entire lecture, Bruce is designated as the reviewer, who reviews and rectifies the notes, Carol is designated as the commentator, who comments on the lecture and the notes, e.g., identifying the possible exam questions from paying attention specifically to the emphasis – written, facial, voice or mannerisms – of the lecturer, and the fourth member Deng is designated as the questioner, who develops questions, which if answered would encapsulate the knowledge provided during the lecture.

Figure7. Single author Figure 7 shows the screen where all group members are not actively engaged at that moment in writing notes after Adam, the note-take, has already written a note for the current slide and is waiting to add more (so the keyboard has dropped out of sight). The other three group members are yet to give input to the notes of the current slide.

Figure8. Multiple authors Figure 8 shows the screen where Bruce, the reviewer, has added extra information regarding Adam’s note and rectified an error in Adam’s note; Carol, the commentator, has made a comment on the current slide; and Deng, the questioner, has not contributed any question yet.

Figure9. Multiple authors Figure 9 shows the screen where Deng, the questioner, has asked a good question about the current slide. Collaborative use of the application allows a group of students to flexibly and maximally share the workload, leverage each one’s strength and expertise, and take advantage of the power of social learning. It can not only increase student engagement in lecture but also has great potential to increase the learning outcome of the topic. Even top-tier students can benefit from small scale ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ [25] where cognitive diversity provides multiple views on the current subject matter that can challenge or validate the current ‘knowledge’ of the individual.

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE AND PRELIMINARY STUDENT FEEDBACK A central server is used for the GroupNotes applications running on multiple Smartphones to work together towards a shared collaborative note-taking task. Figure 10 depicts the GroupNotes system architecture consisting of a GroupNotes server, a GroupNotes application on Smartphones, and a GroupNotes client on the lecturer console. The GroupNotes server provides essential services to the GroupNotes application on Smartphones and the GroupNotes client on the lecturer console as well as a repository that stores all lecture slides, notes from individual students, and reconciled slides and notes. The GroupNotes application runs on each Smartphone and does what have been described in the above section through the services provided by the server. The GroupNotes client runs on the lecturer console and it is completely up to the lecturer to decide on whether they want to make use of it. The lecturer can use it to monitor each group’s note-taking session, post questions to students, and receive responses from students.

Figure 10: The GroupNotes System Architecture

The services provided by the GroupNotes server can be broadly divided into online management (the first three) and offline management (the last three). Online management consists of essential services required by the GroupNotes application and client during a lecture. In particular, session management is to create a collaborative note-taking session for each group and handle session-related activities such as joining/leaving an ongoing session, saving notes of the session back to the repository, adjusting members’ roles in the session, inviting someone outside the group to join the session, recovering from errors or application crashes and so on. The technical solution to session management is based on Xia et al.’s work [26], but extended to cater for the wireless Smartphone environment. Synchronization management handles everything related to shared access to a particular note, including optimistic concurrency control – when multiple students need to concurrently write to the same note, they are allowed to do it anywhere in the note at any time and do not need to wait for a turn to exclusively access the note, consistency maintenance – replicas of the same note on each member’s GroupNotes applications are kept consistent throughout the session in the sense that each update to the note is consistently applied to all replicas, the order in which updates are applied to the note is consistently maintained across all replicas, and the all replicas are identical at the end of the session, and so on. The technical solution to synchronization management is extended from the operational transformation technique [27] to cater for the wireless Smartphone environment. Polling management supports vertical interaction by offering the standard question-and-response feature provided by a clicker solution, e.g., the lecturer can post a quiz/question through the GroupNotes client and students can use their GroupNotes application to vote/answer, and beyond-standard features, e.g., a student can use their GroupNotes application to interact with the lecturer (asking

questions, giving feedback etc.) through the GroupNotes client on the lecturer console. Offline management consists of services not used by the GroupNotes application or client during a lecture. These services are usually used before or after the lecture and accessed through a computer. In particular, user management is for a student to create their login accounts to the system, update their profiles (e.g., enrolled topics, groups they belong to), customize their preferences (e.g., preferred color for their identities in a session, preferred role in a session), and so on. Post-processing management is to reconcile lecture slides and notes (e.g., reconciling notes from each group, selected groups, or the entire class) to generate combined learning objects for students to revise the topic later or for the lecturer to have a better understanding on how well each slide of the lecture was delivered to students or monitor the performance of individual group/student. Repository management is for students or the lecturer to view or download lecture slides, notes, or reconciled slides and notes they have access to. We have collected some preliminary student feedback (from students who have also done the needs finding survey) as to the feasibility of the GroupNotes system for keeping student self-engaged in lectures. We gave a note for them to copy by both pen-and-paper and their own mobile phones. Figure 11 shows that students with modern Smartphones** (with on-screen soft touch keyboards) were able to copy the note in average 64 seconds, which is comparable to the time using pen-and-paper for the same task (average 70 seconds). In contrast, the average time using all other mobile phones* (including those with the traditional phone keypads and Smartphones with physical keyboards) are significantly longer (average 217 seconds).

Figure 11: Average time to complete a simple note-taking task Figure 12 shows that most students who do not have Smartphones at the moment plan to have one in less than 18 months.

Figure 12: Anticipated time to own a Smartphone if not having one Figure 13 shows that most students would use the GroupNotes to take lectures during lectures if they owned a Smartphone.

Figure 13: Whether to use GroupNotes for taking notes provided owning a Smartphone? Figure 14 shows that most students think the GroupNotes system will help keep them self-engaged in lectures.

Figure 14: Whether can GroupNotes help keep students self-engaged in lectures? Conclusions and Future work A lecture is typically not interactive and will continue its didactic style of one-way information flow into the foreseeable future. Consequently, low attendance rate and student disengagement in lectures are the common problems in most universities. Complementary to existing approaches that re-design lectures to incorporate more vertical interaction between the lecturer and students by taking advantage of special electronic devices, our approach lets a student be kept self-engaged by allowing them to voluntarily participate in horizontal interaction

within a virtual group in a lecture class using their everyday pocket device. This approach attempts to apply a student-centered collaborative learning pedagogy into the lecture environment through a novel real-time collaborative note-taking application GroupNotes on Smartphones. Preliminary student feedback has shown that the approach is pedagogically and technically feasible and students are quite open to this approach due to its fun factor and peer motivation. The current GroupNotes application is designed for Android-based Smartphones. To address platform agnosticism, we will re-design the application for other mainstream Smartphones such as iPhone, Windows Phone etc. The GroupNotes server is still rudimentary and in particular, the polling management and post-processing management services are not yet available. The GroupNotes client on lecture console is yet to be designed and implemented. Ultimately, we need to test our hypothesis after the Group Notes system is deployed for pilot use in our university. REFERENCES 1. Bligh, D.A., What's The Use of Lectures? 2000, San

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