Caltech professor uses app to make lectures more interactive
An app for iPhones and iPads, made by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) alumni who co-founded Su-Kam Intelligent Education Systems (SKIES), lets students create a shared bulletin board to discuss lecture topics in real-time. Campus Technology reports that Caltech professor Bruce Hay uses it to gauge how much his students comprehend from each lecture, tailoring future lessons based on their questions and their rating of their understanding of individual concepts. SKIES co-founder Julius Su said students are already multitasking in class, but his app allows them to “satisfy the itch of shifting their attention with another productive task, even if it does briefly pull them away from the lecture”. Furthermore, Professor Hay found use of the app to coincide with higher grades for his students, from a class average of a B to an A.

Teaching and Learning

Making Lectures More Interactive

An app called SKIES transforms a traditional lecture into a shared learning experience.

SKIES works as a sort of shared bulletin board, in which instructors and students post class materials that are linked together in a "class tree."

In his nearly two decades of teaching biology at the California Institute of Technology, one of the challenges that Bruce Hay has struggled with over the years is how to encourage student participation during lectures.

"If you don't have participation, then you're not getting any feedback on what students are learning," he said. "It's just an hour and a half monologue without really knowing that you're getting through to anyone, or more importantly, where you're not getting through."

Recently, Hay discovered a solution to the problem: a free app for iPhones and iPads developed by two Caltech alumni.

Produced by Su-Kam Intelligent Education Systems (SKIES), named after co-founders Julius Su and Victor Kam, the app enables students to construct an interconnected web of knowledge around a topic as the professor is teaching — turning a traditional lecture format into a shared, interactive learning experience.

"Students learn best not when they are passive recipients of content, but when they are actively involved in their own learning," Su said. With the SKIES app, he said, "teachers and students can be creating and constructing knowledge together. That makes the classroom more lively, engaging and democratic — and just a great place to be. It turns into a better environment for learning."

Hay has found that to be the case in his own classroom, where he has seen the average student grade in his genetics class rise by more than 10 percentage points since he began using the app.

"It makes the class more interactive," he said. "It has gotten students more engaged, and they are asking more questions. And the remarkable thing is that grades have increased as well."

Collaborative Learning

The idea for the app came when Su was a graduate student in Hay's class at Caltech.

"I was entering information into a knowledgebase as he was lecturing," Su said. "I was adding questions, useful tips, references and other things that would help students learn the material as they followed along. What was interesting was, the other students started asking if they could add things into the database themselves."

That's when he and Kam realized: This process of constructing knowledge and contributing to a shared database of information "was a fantastic way to learn," he said.

Su described the SKIES app as a "shared bulletin board" in which instructors and students post class materials in the form of "cards," which might contain text, pictures, drawings, audio clips, Web links, videos or even questions in several different formats.

The cards are linked together in an easy-to-navigate "class tree" that branches out from an initial PowerPoint presentation or other multimedia material. "It turns a regular PowerPoint presentation into something a little more structured," Su said. "You can see how ideas link to each other, and you can branch off to include supplemental materials on the side."

Instructors can add questions for students to answer during the lecture to check for understanding — and students can create questions of their own.

"What I think makes it really compelling is that students can learn from each other," Su said. "The teacher interface looks basically the same as the student interface; everyone operates at the same level, although the teacher has additional moderator capabilities."

Instructor and Student Benefits

Caltech's Center for Teaching, Learning and Outreach, where Su is a program manager, has helped faculty use the SKIES app throughout the university.