Blending Audience Response Systems into an Information Systems Professional Course

Abstract

Many higher education institutions are moving towards blended learning environments that seek to move towards a student-centred ethos, where students are stakeholders in the learning process. This often involves multi-modal learner-support technologies capable of operating in a range of time and place settings. This article considers the impact of an Audience Response System (ARS) upon the ongoing development of an Information Systems Professional course at the Masters level in the College of Business at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. The course allows students to consider ethical issues faced by an Information Systems Professional. Given the sensitivity of some of the topics explored within this area, an ARS offers an ideal vehicle for allowing students to respond to potentially contentious questions without revealing their identity to the rest of the group.The paper reports the findings of a pilot scheme designed to explore the efficacy of the technology. Use of a blended learning framework to frame the discussion allowed the authors to consider the readiness of institution, lecturers, and students to use ARS. From a usage viewpoint, multiple choice questions lead to further discussion of student responses related to important issues in the unit. From an impact viewpoint the use of ARS in the class appeared to be successful, but some limitations were reported.

Promoting student-centred blended learning in higher education: A model

“…The off-campus weekly online discussion was the third component in the asynchronous mode, which was, in fact, a typical e-learning programme without physical meetings with the course teachers (Authors 2, 2012). Apparently, the course teacher’s efforts led to a pedagogical change from one-directional instruction to a student-centred interactive approach (Burgess et al, 2016), thereby creating a technology-supported environment (Shin et al, 2018; Shu and Gu, 2018) in the university. Although referring to and bringing in online discussions as examples in the face-to-face classes is not new in educational settings, it is absolutely an innovation in the context of many third world countries including Bangladesh.…”

“…In the 21st century, integration of an online component with face-to-face teaching and learning has become indispensable in both basic and higher education. As a result of technological advancement and pedagogical transformation related to delivering contents and engaging students in collaborative learning, adoption of blended learning has increasingly gained currency, especially in higher education (Burgess et al, 2016; Shin et al, 2018). Blended learning has been found more effective than traditional e-learning in terms of keeping contact with the students and making classes interactive (Bicen et al, 2014; Boelens et al, 2018).…”

“…It is adopted to support interactions between students in the online mode and improve learning outcomes (Bojović, 2017). Research studies in blended learning have documented that it has reoriented the pedagogical approaches in higher education from one-directional instruction to student-centred interactive modalities (Burgess et al, 2016; Shin et al, 2018). In a blended learning setting, instructional support depends on two factors such as informational support and process guidance where informational support is negatively related to social participation while process guidance positively determines social participation (Cocquyt et al, 2019).…”