Project Overview

While large lectures are efficient settings for delivering material to students from professors, they struggle to allow for effective communication. Many, if not all of us, have been a part of lectures where the professor will lecture for 50 minutes and occasionally stop and ask if there are any questions, only to be met with silence. Many students feel as though they can’t ask questions for fear of being perceived as “dumb” or “stupid”. Additionally, some lecture halls are so large that it is extremely difficult to hear a conversation between the back of the room and the front of the room where the professor is. These sorts of issues occur in all large-size lecture halls across campus. This is an important problem because effective student-professor communication is vital to student success. Not only does communication allow the professor to know what students are struggling with, it also allows for meaningful discussions and clarification on important topics.

Our solution to this problem is building an interactive learning tool to bridge the gap between students and professors. Our application will have chat rooms (or “live lectures”) for different lectures led by a professor. In these chat rooms, the students will be able to send messages to the class and professor, virtually raise their hand, anonymously ask questions, and answer in-class polls created by the professor. By allowing students to raise their hand virtually, the professor has a much easier time detecting questions as opposed to scanning a lecture hall of 300+ for a physical hand. To combat the shyness of some students, the anonymous chat feature will allow students to anonymously ask questions and allow them to feel more comfortable in the classroom. The poll feature will allow the professor to get feedback on students’ learning and evaluate student participation. The chat rooms will be open 24/7, enabling students and professors to communicate during class as well as outside of class. With these features, our application aims to finally bridge the communication gap in large lectures.

Phase II Explaination

While this project was worked on in a previous semester, our team elected to completely re-do the project so we are not using any of the previous teams work. After discussing with our client we were given the option to start from scratch because the work from the previous semester was not up to our clients standards. We elected to start from scratch because we are able to develop the project faster this way since we can choose technologies that our group is familiar with. Essentially our project is labeled as Phase II but it is in actuality in Phase I.