The Interactive Lecture: Teaching and Learning Technologies for Large Classrooms

Conventional lectures in large classrooms are connected to fundamental didactic problems due to a lack of interactivity and feedback opportunities. In an interactive lecture each student is equipped with a light-weight, mobile device that can be used to interact with the lecturer during the lesson, thus creating an additional channel of communication. These devices support new teaching and learning paradigms such as participatory simulations. In this paper, we present our experiences with the usage of mobile devices in lectures. After discussing the didactic benefits of interactive lectures, we introduce the software toolkits used in our scenarios, we highlight selected tools like a quiz tool or a support tool for participatory simulation, and present major results from six studies we have conducted