Class Pulse: A SMAC Application to Enhance Student Feedback and Interaction

Nowadays mobile devices such as laptops and smartphones have become the main agents for learning in classrooms via participation in polls, multiple-choice questions, and quizzes. Students’ comprehension and instructor’s pedagogy can be improved by facilitating a platform that supports and enhances feedback and interaction. For this purpose, we propose a social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) application that facilitates interaction between faculty and students in the form of real-time feedback from students during lecture sessions, and helps students in getting answers to their questions from other students, and helps instructors in analyzing the feedback and interaction within and across lecture session.

This paper describes the proposed application functionality and the details of a prototype built for refining the functionality of the proposed application and its efficacy. The paper also presents a summary of the evaluation results of the prototype application by demonstrating it to a couple of senior faculty members and 10 students.