Development of a mobile-friendly classroom support system to improve students' presentation skills

Work in Progress: Communication skills are indispensable for becoming successful in the global engineering community. Among various communication skills, presentation skills are regarded as one of the greatest career enhancers for engineers. Nevertheless, it is the weakest skill of most Japanese engineering students. To overcome this inadequacy, we offered a presentation skills course for sophomore Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students by integrating video streaming and numerical peer evaluation using IT technology. This paper examines the feasibility and the students' acceptability of the newly developed IT peer evaluation system. In implementing the system, three research questions were posed: 1. Does the new system facilitate classroom management? 2. Is the new system more accepted than the existing paper-based method by the students? 3. Does the new system promote the overall improvement of students' presentation skills? The preliminary results showed that the new system facilitated classroom management, and that it was accepted by the students primarily due to its functional requirement such as utility and non-functional requirement such as promptness. Furthermore, the students' average numerical peer evaluation scores of physical messages and audience interaction mostly improved.