Welcome to the Fast.Q project!
Students! – Have you ever sat in a lecture thinking to yourself “I really haven’t any idea what this lecturer is talking about” promptly followed by “everybody else seems to get it so I will keep quiet and stick it out” promptly followed by “ok I REALLY don’t get this… lets play angry birds”.
Lecturers! – Have you ever been stood at the front of a room full of students, explaining a difficult concept (such as the ability to wake up early in the morning) and then asked the question “does this make sense to everybody?”. Chances are this is followed by a room full of blank faces and a general mutter of agreement. Later that day you receive emails from half of your students telling you that they didn’t understand the topic that you were explaining.
Fast.Q is an anonymous feedback system to be used by students during a lecture. This system will allow students to ask questions, or perhaps ask for some reiteration on a topic that they haven’t understood. It removes the need for students to be singled out from their peers and gives the lecturer some indication of the success of his session.
The system consists of 2 main viewpoints, and in their basic form they are:
- The Student – Students will be able to post a question to a lecturer and also give general feedback on the session.
- The Lecturer – The lecturer will have a display of the questions that the students have asked. In addition questions will be grouped by some form of AI and NLP so that the lecturer can easily be notified if a certain topic is causing a good number of students a problem.
As the system progresses new and intuitive ways to seamlessly integrate this system into the lecture sessions will be explored. Also new ways of visualising the data will constantly be explored to maximise the efficiency of the Fast.Q system.
Who we are
The Fast.Q project is based at the University of Lincoln, UK and is funded by the Centre for Educational Research and Development (CERD). All posts on this blog are representative of the individual which posted them and do in no way represent the views of the University of Lincoln or CERD.
The project consists of a small team of developers:
Project Leader/Lead Researcher
Dr John Murray
Developers
Peter Anderson – 2nd Year BSc Games Computing Undergraduate
Boaz Yehezkel – 3rd Year BSc Computer Science Undergraduate
This blog will be updated by all members of the development team on the progress of the Fast.Q project. If you wish to find out more about what we do or who we are, or how many sugars we take in our coffee, please do not hesitate to contact one of us on our emails in the Contact Section of our blog.
We hope that this project can enhance the way in which students interact in their lectures and overall improve the standards of higher educational teaching.
Regards,
The Fast.Q team