Instructor authoring tool : a step towards promoting dynamic lecture-style classrooms

Abstract

The Instructor Authoring Tool of the Classroom Learning Partner project provides an efficient tool for university professors and other teachers of lecture-style classrooms to construct lecture slides that can easily accommodate effective in-class exercises. In designing such an authoring tool, five criterions were taken into consideration: An enhanced ability to support instructors' use of in-class exercises by facilitating the slide-generation process, the use of Microsoft PowerPoint as a basic tool, enabling real-time feedback of student performance on exercises, the leveraging of past student mistakes and misunderstood concepts in enhancing teaching, and the support of an automatic tutoring system to be implemented at a later time. These criterions were successfully met by the resulting instructor authoring tool, though improvements towards facilitating the slide-generation process and support for real-time feedback of student performance have yet to be tested in a formal academic setting.