Department of Life Sciences, University of New Hampshire at Manchester, Manchester, New Hampshire.
School of Health and Biomedical Science within the College of Science, Engineering and Health, RMIT University, Bundoora, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Adv Physiol Educ. 2021 Jan 1;45(1):10-17. doi: 10.1152/advan.00147.2020.
Engaging undergraduate students in large classes is a constant challenge for many lecturers, as student participation and engagement can be limited. This is a concern since there is a positive correlation between increased engagement and student success. The lack of student feedback on content delivery prevents lecturers from identifying topics that would benefit students if reviewed. Implementing novel methods to engage the students in course content and create ways by which they can inform the lecturer of the difficult concepts is needed to increase student success. In the present study, we investigated the use of Twitter as a scalable approach to enhance engagement with course content and peer-to-peer interaction in a large course. In this pilot study, students were instructed to tweet the difficult concepts identified from content delivered by videos. A software program automatically collected and parsed the tweets to extract summary statistics on the most common difficult concepts, and the lecturer used the information to prepare face-to-face (F2F) lectorial sessions. The key findings of the study were ) the uptake of Twitter (i.e., registration on the platform) was similar to the proportion of students who participated in F2F lectorials, ) students reviewed content soon after delivery to tweet difficult concepts to lecturer, ) Twitter increased engagement with lecturers, ) the difficult concepts were similar to previous years, yet the automated gathering of Twitter data was more efficient and time saving for the lecturer, and ) students found the lectorial review sessions very valuable.
让大学生参与大型课堂一直是许多讲师面临的挑战，因为学生的参与度和投入度可能有限。这是一个令人担忧的问题，因为学生的参与度与他们的成功之间存在正相关关系。缺乏对内容传递的学生反馈，使得讲师无法确定如果进行审查会对学生有益的主题。需要实施新的方法来吸引学生参与课程内容，并创造他们可以向讲师告知难点的途径，以提高学生的成功率。在本研究中，我们调查了使用 Twitter 作为一种可扩展的方法，来增强学生对大型课程内容的参与度和同学之间的互动。在这项试点研究中，学生被要求发推他们从视频中所学到的困难概念。一个软件程序自动收集和解析这些推文，以提取关于最常见困难概念的汇总统计信息，然后讲师利用这些信息准备面对面的辅导课。研究的主要发现是：) Twitter 的采用率（即平台注册）与参与面对面辅导课的学生比例相似；) 学生在内容交付后不久就会复习内容，并向讲师发推困难概念；) Twitter 增加了与讲师的互动；) 困难概念与前几年相似，但自动收集 Twitter 数据对讲师来说更高效和省时；) 学生认为辅导课复习非常有价值。
