Abstract
To encourage students to take initiative ask questions, express self-opinions in class, domestic elementary and junior high school starts to equip with tablet or smart phone in class, aiming to provide a rapid bi-directional channel for students to communicate with teacher. However, without integrates a well-designed mobile application, the efficacy of handheld devices is limited to digitalize course materials. It is still hard to facilitate student actively engaged by conducting educational technologies. In this paper, we proposed an instant response system called “MicroLearning”. In concept of “build an instant interaction between teacher and students without occupying too much lecture schedule”. Every classroom interaction as a “limited expertise and student can be done in short time” task, such as: “multiple- choice question” 、 “an open-ended discussion with hints”. According to different teaching purpose, lecturer can send it to student’s mobile devices and wait for reply. In the process of participating micro class activities, teacher can know the level of student’s understanding and adjust lectures by their instant feedbacks. The other hand, students can learn how to cooperate with peers and express their personal opinions to lecturer. We conduct a 10 weeks’ experiment in a graduate course, which consists of class observation and system deployment, aiming to evaluate our instant response system can support active learning for students in higher education field. From the perspective of quantitative and qualitative point of view, the results indicated that students are feel more interested in the content area of this course and like to share more content-related discussions with peers. More importantly, they start to take the initiative of asking questions with computer-mediated assistance.