Enhancing instructor-student and student-student interactions with mobile interfaces and summarization

Abstract

Educational research has demonstrated that asking students to respond to reflection prompts can increase interaction between instructors and students, which in turn can improve both teaching and learning especially in large classrooms. However, administering an instructor’s prompts, collecting the students’ responses, and summarizing these responses for both instructors and students is challenging and expensive. To address these challenges, we have developed an application called CourseMIRROR (Mobile Insitu Reflections and Review with Optimized Rubrics). CourseMIRROR uses a mobile interface to administer prompts and collect reflective responses for a set of instructor-assigned course lectures. After collection, CourseMIRROR automatically summarizes the reflections with an extractive phrase summarization method, using a clustering algorithm to rank extracted phrases by student coverage. Finally, CourseMIRROR presents the phrase summary to both instructors and students to help them understand the difficulties and misunderstandings encountered.