#FB08 #quiz app #gamification approach #asynchronous learning #synchronous learning

Prof. Dr. Lena Evertz, FB 08 Business Administration and Economics

Field of teaching: Human Resource Management

Challenge

• In basic courses of Bachelor's degree programmes, students are often confronted with a multitude of new terminology, theories and models, which can quickly lead to being overwhelmed and demotivated. Therefore, lecturers are faced with the challenge of creating a learning offer that increases learning motivation in this special teaching education situation. In particular, the question arises as to what can be a low-threshold learning offer from the student's point of view, which picks them up in their everyday learning.

Solution

• In order to motivate students to learn, the teaching content is prepared in gamified form together with the students in a quiz app.
• The use of a quiz app is intended to promote the lowest possible threshold access to the learning material and to awaken in the students the willingness to challenge themselves and thus to be motivated to continuously engage with the learning material.
• Studies show that the use of a quiz in university studies can positively influence the social interaction of students as well as improve the performance of students (see e.g. Pechenkina et al., 2017, Söbke & Zander, 2018).

Benefits

• QuizAcademy can be used as both a synchronous and asynchronous form of learning.
• In the context of asynchronous learning, students can selectively repeat course content in small learning nuggets at any time according to individual needs via a quiz app.
• In this process, students are involved in creating the questions for the QuizApp, which encourages reflection on the course content.
• In addition, a weekly live quiz in plenary is used as a form of synchronous learning. This combines the transfer of knowledge with fun and leads to a high level of attention among the students.

Details

• QuizAcademy is used to teach the basics in the course "Personnel" (FB 08). For the vast majority of participants (Bachelor of Business Administration, 2nd semester) the course is a compulsory module. The group size varies between 100 and 150 students.
• The learning content of the course is prepared by the students in Moodle in the form of multiple-choice tasks in a rotating process and is quality-assured by the lecturer and made available in the app. In addition to the preparation of multiple-choice tasks, the app also offers the option of storing open questions.
• In addition to the possibility of repeating what has been learned individually, a so-called live quiz is played weekly in the plenum via the app. Students use their smartphone, tablet or PC to answer various multiple-choice questions on topics from the previous week's lecture. This gamification approach also helps to motivate those students to learn who previously could only be motivated to repeat the content to a limited extent. A positive aspect is that the students pay a lot of attention during the live quiz.

Teaching education and digital media

• The students use the Moodle etherpad to create new questions.
• For repeating the lecture content as well as for participating in the live quiz, the app QuizAcademy can be downloaded free of charge via the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. However, it is also possible to use the content via the browser; all that is required is to scan a QR code. Registration on the part of the students is not necessary.

Stumbling blocks

• The use of QuizAcademy should be supportive and not exclusively used to teach the basics and requires moderation. Supplemental learning opportunities should be made available, particularly for achieving higher taxonomy level learning objectives.

Recommendation

• Just try it out! :)
• QuizAcademy is - as of today (July 2022) - free of charge in the field of public education and DSGVO compliant.

Links / Notes

• https://quizacademy.de/
• Pechenkina, E., Laurence, D., Oates, G., Eldridge, D., & Hunter, D. (2017). Using a gamified mobile app to increase student engagement, retention and academic achievement. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 14(1), 1-12.
• Söbke, H. & Zander, S., (2018). Motivational design by intertwining gamification and didactic context. In: Krömker, D. & Schroeder, U. (Eds.), DeLFI 2018 - The 16th e-learning conference on computer science. Bonn: Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (pp. 141-152).