An improved group discussion system for active learning using smartphone and its experimental evaluation

In general at universities, the professors cannot provide all needed information to satisfy the students because they have different knowledge and interests. Therefore, the students should study the learning materials by themselves. Our previous work suggested an interactive learning process in order to improve the students learning motivation and the self-learning time. To improve the progress speed of a lecture and the efficiency of the self-learning, we proposed an active learning system (ALS) using mobile devices. Moreover, we performed experimental evaluation of our ALS and showed that the proposed ALS can improve student self-learning and concentration. However, the proposed ALS could not increase the examination pass rate of the students even if the self-learning time was increased. To solve this problem, we propose to improve the group discussion system of ALS. In this paper, we performed experimental evaluation of the improved group discussion system of ALS. The evaluation results show that the improved group discussion system of ALS can increase the examination pass rate.