New teaching and learning technologies for interactive lectures

Conventional lectures in large classrooms come with fundamental didactic problems due to a lack of interactivity and feedback opportunities. In an interactive lecture each student is equipped with a light-weight, mobile device that can be used to interact with the lecturer during the lesson, thus creating an additional channel of communication. These devices support new teaching and learning paradigms such as participatory simulations. We present our experiences with the usage of mobile devices in lectures. After discussing the didactic benefits of interactive lectures, we introduce the software toolkits used in our scenarios, we highlight selected tools such as a quiz tool or a support tool for participatory simulation, and present major results from six pedagogical studies we have conducted.