Customized Teaching Scenarios for Smartphones in University Lecture Settings

Many teachers use Audience Response Systems (ARS) in lectures to re-activate their listeners and to get an insight in students’ knowledge of the current lecture contents. Plenty of such applications have been developed in recent years, they provide a high variety of different teaching scenarios with the use of the students’ smartphones, including quizzes, lecture feedback and dynamic message boards. We developed a novel application based on an abstract model to enable this variety of customizable teaching scenarios within one application. After presenting the application to the first charge of lecturers, the responses were quite good, and several new teaching scenarios were created and used. This paper presents first experiences when using a variety of customizable teaching scenarios, the special opportunities and challenges as well as the opinions of lecturers and students, which we collected with a survey at the end of the semester.