An Approach to Support Interactive Activities in Live Stream Lectures

摘要

Higher education is still mainly based on traditional face-to-face teaching formats such as lectures. Although known for a long time, the demand for alternative lecture designs has only recently grown significantly due to the present pandemic crisis, which requires a physical separation between the students and also the lecturer. This separation results in challenges of its own: While most solutions already allow the lecture to be held via streaming, it is even more challenging to involve students, or to create interactions with them or between them. Some approaches allow to activate students through simple polls, chats, or collaboration in breakout sessions. However, either the functional scope of these activities is severely limited or they are restricted to small scenarios. The contents of this paper have been under investigation for some time, but in lieu of the current CoViD-19 pandemic, the authors have decided to apply their preliminary findings in actual lectures and present the results here. The main goal is to investigate the addition of more advanced activities that can be adapted to the current scenario. Therefore, an approach is presented that enables lecturers to create custom workflows of interactive activities such as several types of polls, question and answer, instant feedback, or group formations with corresponding interactions. The application in real scenarios is currently being investigated.