Harvard College

Brian Lukoff

Eric Mazur

Gary King

Kelly Miller

Participatory activity carried out using electronic devices is enhanced by occupying the attention of participants who complete a task before a set completion time. For example, a request or question having an expected response time less than the remaining answer time may be provided to early-finishing participants.

Management of off-task time in a participatory environment

Textual responses to open-ended (i.e., free-response) items provided by participants (e.g., by means of mobile wireless devices) are automatically classified, enabling an instructor to assess the responses in a convenient, organized fashion and adjust instruction accordingly.

Cluster analysis of participant responses for test generation or teaching

Representative embodiments of a method for grouping participants in an activity include the steps of: (i) defining a grouping policy; (ii) storing, in a database, participant records that include a participant identifier, a characteristic associated with the participant, and/or an identifier for a participant's handheld device; (iii) defining groupings based on the policy and characteristics of the participants relating to the policy and to the activity; and (iv) communicating the groupings to the handheld devices to establish the groups.

Participant grouping for enhanced interactive experience

In various embodiments, subject matter for improving discussions in connection with an educational resource is identified and summarized by analyzing annotations made by students assigned to a discussion group to identify high-quality annotations likely to generate responses and stimulate discussion threads, identifying clusters of high-quality annotations relating to the same portion or related portions of the educational resource, extracting and summarizing text from the annotations, and combining, in an electronically represented document, the extracted and summarized text and (i) at least some of the annotations and the portion or portions of the educational resource or (ii) clickable links thereto.

Instructional support platform for interactive learning environments

In various embodiments, online discussions in connection with an educational resource are improved by analyzing annotations made by students assigned to a discussion group to identify high-quality annotations likely to generate responses and stimulate discussion threads and by making the identified annotations visible to students not assigned to the discussion group.

Stimulating online discussion in interactive learning environments

Anonymous pretesting items for subsequent presentation to participants in a group enable an instructor to validate responses and revise the items accordingly.

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Boston, MA, United States of America

Brian Lukoff