SpeakUp – A Mobile App Facilitating Audience Interaction

Abstract

Abstract.A dynamic student-teacher interaction during class is an important part of the learning experience. However, in regular class settings and especially in large classrooms, it is a challenging task to encourage students to participate as they tend to be intimidated by the size of the audience. In this paper, in order to overcome this issue, we present SpeakUp, a novel context-aware mobile application supporting the social interactions between speakers and audiences through anonymous messaging and a peer rating mechanism. Context-awarness is achieved by bounding interactions in space and time using location-based authorization and message boards with limited lifetime. Anonymity is used as an icebreaker, so students dare writing down any question that pops in their heads. Peer rating is used to make it easy for teachers to access the most relevant ones and address them. We performed an evaluation with 140 students over five fourhour lessons that indicate that SpeakUp is easy to use and is perceived as useful.

The perceptions of using instant interaction applications for enhancing peer discussion in a flipped classroom

“…On the other hand, the instant interactive system showing responses in like-ranking sequence also allows users to convey text messages. When it comes to voting in the instant interaction group, the system will provide users with "Like" or "Dislike" icons to press (Holzer et al, 2013;Holzer et al, 2014). In this way, we can see how popular an idea is by checking the like-ranking results.…”

Rule of thumb

“…It has been used in several classroom settings, has been shown to increase interaction, and is appreciated by both lecturers and students [15,14]. SpeakUp scores 83 [15] on the System Usability Scale [2] (SUS) which indicates good to excellent usability.…”

Early awareness of Global Issues and development of soft skills in engineering education: An interdisciplinary approach to communication

“…With SpeakUp [4], [5], a chat room was created at the beginning of each lecture where students could anonymously post questions and comments. The chat room then disappeared the next day.…”

“…Internet access will enable economic progress by increasing growth rates and benefi ng start-ups, helping them with collabora on and networking. 5,6 Technical Dimension-Solutions…”

“…We would like to acknowledge the work of the Vice Presidency for Academic Affairs and the College of Humanities at EPFL for creating the ambitious Global Issues course 5 , allocating resources, and coordinating the administrative efforts and the logistics.…”