ASQ: Interactive Web Presentations for Hybrid MOOCs

Vasileios TriglianosUniversity of Lugano, Switzerland

vasileios.triglianos@usi.chhttp://asq.inf.usi.ch

Cesare PautassoUniversity of Lugano, Switzerland

c.pautasso@ieee.orghttp://www.pautasso.info

ABSTRACTASQ is a Web application for creating and delivering in-teractive HTML5 presentations. It is designed to supportteachers that need to gather real-time feedback from the stu-dents while delivering their lectures. Presentation slides aredelivered to viewers that can answer the questions embed-ded in the slides. The objective is to maximize the efficiencyof bi-directional communication between the lecturer and alarge audience. More specifically, in the context of a hybridMOOC classroom, a teacher can use ASQ to get feedback inreal time about the level of comprehension of the presentedmaterial while reducing the time for gathering survey data,monitoring attendance and assessing solutions.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsK.3.1 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Infor-mation Science Education—Collaborative learning, Computer-assisted instruction (CAI)

KeywordsHTML5, Software clicker, impress.js

1. INTRODUCTIONThe Web is disrupting the education sector by widely

broadening and flattening the field for higher education.While most of the ongoing efforts in Massive Open OnlineCourses (MOOCs [4]) are dedicated to scaling teaching toonline classes of hundreds of thousands of students, in ourwork we target so-called hybrid MOOCs [3] which are in-tended to improve the traditional offline teaching experi-ence with the support of modern Web technologies. In thisposter we demonstrate a novel tool which pushes the lim-its of current Web technologies to support the delivery ofhighly interactive presentations and enhance the classroomlearning experience. The tool name includes the concepts of”Slides, Questions and Answers” summarising its main fea-tures: broadcasting presentation slides to the audience withexplicit support for asking and answering questions – bothfrom the teacher to the students as well as from the studentsback to the teacher. The Web-based nature of the tool low-ers to a great extent the barriers to set up and use such asystem.

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).WWW 2013 Companion, May 13–17, 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.ACM 978-1-4503-2038-2/13/05.

2. FEATURESThe notion of a presentation in ASQ assumes the exis-

tence of two roles: a teacher and multiple ’audience’ partic-ipants. The teacher can insert questions within an HTML5slideshow powered by impress.js in order to gather informa-tion from the audience through background knowledge sur-veys, answers to comprehension question regarding the pre-sented material, brainstorming and polling questionnaires,as well as small programming assignments. Teachers canmanage a set of presentations that have been uploaded onthe ASQ server, they can edit them and start the broadcast.At presentation time, clients connect to the ASQ server us-ing a standard Web browser, receive a copy of the slideshowand follow the presentation synchronously with the teacher.If the students are co-located with the teacher, the slideshowis also projected with a beamer. By design, the participantshave no control over the flow of the presentation shown ontheir Web browsers. To track and provide general awarenessof the status of the connected users, a map of the audienceis shown on the teacher’s tablet. When questions from theteacher pop up, the audience members can answer them.The teacher is in control of the process as the clients sendreal-time notification about their progress and status. Afterall answers have been gathered, ASQ logs them togetherwith timing meta-data and displays a statistical analysisabout the feedback. This can be shown and discussed withthe audience before moving on with the presentation. If par-ticipants have a question, they can enter it anytime throughASQ and associate it with the slide that provoked it. Theteacher is notified and can decide to go back to the ques-tion either immediately or at the end of the lecture. Withlarge classes this mechanism is expected to enable ”shy stu-dents” to provide insightful feedback, while also enablingthe teacher (or more likely the teaching assistants) to filterirrelevant questions or comments.

3. ARCHITECTURE & USER INTERFACEASQ is a Web-based, distributed User Interface applica-

tion, which provides several views that are tailored to therequrements of specific user roles (the presenter and the au-dience participants and in some cases also the presenter as-sistants) and take advantage of specific capabilities of clientdevices (i.e., desktops, tablets and smartphones). ASQ isbuilt with HTML5 on top of the express.js framework fornode.js. It leverages WebSockets to exchange events in real-time between connected Web browsers and the ASQ serverand extends the impress.js HTML5 presentation frameworkto broadcast interactive presentations over the Web.

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Figure 1: ASQ Screenshots: 1) Presenter Control Panel; 2) Question; 3) Answer Statistics

3.1 Presenter and Audience ViewsWhenever a teacher logs in to his/her account on the

server that is hosting ASQ, a control panel view with theuploaded presentations is rendered (Fig. 1). Presentationscan be added by uploading them and directly edited fromthe control panel. Clicking on ”start presentation” beginsthe broadcast: a popup advertising the URI to be sharedwith the audience is displayed. The audience may copy thisinvitation URI and connect to the server to watch the pre-sentation. It is also possible to connect to the server andretrieve a list of the currently ongoing public presentationsessions. While preparing a presentation the presenter mayinject questions at specific points of the presentation. Todo so, questions may be defined using a simple data modelwhich can either be embedded in the presentation HTML asa custom microformat or through a simple editor availablefrom within ASQ. Questions and the corresponding answersstatistics can also be uploaded and downloaded using a sim-ple JSON serialization. For each question, the author needsto specify the question text and the type of question. Formultiple choice answers, it is possible to enumerate the pos-sible answers and mark which of them are correct so thatASQ can automatically grade the answers.After the participants in the class point their Web browsers

to the presentation URI, they are presented with the cur-rent slide as shown by the teacher. When the presenta-tion reaches a question, each member of the audience is pre-sented with a popup that allows them to review the question,provide an answer for it and explicitly indicate that theyare done answering the question. At the same time, theteacher’s view shows a progress bar indicating the numberof connected clients that have already answered the ques-tion. Each audience member can change the given answeruntil the teacher closes the question. ASQ can do so auto-matically when the progress bar has reached its completionor when the preset time for the question is up, at whichpoint the question popup disappears and is replaced with astatistical analysis of the answers, which can lead to furtherclass discussions.

3.2 Assessment modesDepending on the type of question, ASQ supports differ-

ent mechanisms to check the quality of the feedback. Foropen questions, a simple filtering step is inserted betweenthe stream of feedback coming from the audience and thepresentation view summarizing it. For multiple choice ques-tions, ASQ supports their automatic assessment, assumingthat the teacher has configured it with the list of correct

answers. The same holds for programming questions, forwhich ASQ can run the solutions against the correspondingtest suites or oracle functions. Other types of questions mayrequire more than a simple binary feedback. Thus it is pos-sible to configure ASQ for staff-assessment, peer-assessmentor self-assessment. In the first case, answers are graded andcorrected by a pool of teaching assistants, who also collect anumber of exemplary solutions to be discussed in plenary. Inpeer-assessment mode, students that have already answeredto a question can spend their time checking the answers oftheir peers. This process has the double advantage of mini-mizing idle time, thus keeping students engaged, as well asallowing students to see the different ways their classmatesapproach the same problem. Finally, self-assement works byproviding students with a well-defined rubric [1].

4. RELATED WORK & CONCLUSIONASQ is inspired by Informa [2], a Java-based software

clicker that supports a rich set of problem types and pro-motes peer-assessment during the idle time between answer-ing and waiting for the whole class to finish. ASQ adds sup-port for integrating bi-directional questions within slideshowpresentations. In our experience, thanks to the use of Webtechnologies, ASQ is much more lightweight to introducein the class, since only a Web browser is required. We havestarted to use ASQ at the University of Lugano with promis-ing initial results. The tool has shown good acceptance withits target users and good scalability in large classrooms. Weare closely following the evolution of the HTML5 platformto incorporate additional features, such as WebRTC supportfor live video streaming in the browser, which would enableto apply ASQ within distributed teaching scenarios.

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Jacques Daf-flon, Margarita Grinvald, Max von Bulow and Georgios Koko-sioulis for their hard work in creating the ASQ prototype.

5. REFERENCES[1] H. Andrade. The effects of instructional rubrics on

learning to write. Current Issues in Education, 4(4),April 2001.

[2] M. Hauswirth and A. Adamoli. Solve and evaluate withinforma: a java-based classroom response system forteaching java. In Proc. of PPPJ ’09, pages 1–10, 2009.

[3] F. G. Martin. Will massive open online courses changehow we teach? CACM, 55(8):26–28, August 2012.

[4] A. McAuley, B. Stewart, G. Siemens, and D. Cormier.The MOOC model for digital practice.http://www.elearnspace.org/, 2007.

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