Life and business are drastically changing, and we are likely to see more disruption to our normal routine activities, not only in the short term but also in the long run. We need to rethink how we can adapt and create favourable new working conditions under this COVID-19 crisis. When thinking about the creation and dissemination of educational activities, still typically based on the physical presence of pupils and learners in classes of up to 100 people in some cases (e.g. university modules), we wished to provide an off-the-shelf solution to mitigate the enforced physical separation that this crisis has provoked.
At a glance, current Learning Management Systems (LMS) allow instructors to upload course information for easy student access. Standard LMSs such as Blackboard, Canvas, and Moodle (to name a few), provide an accessible exchange of information between teachers and students. If the department delivers a course asynchronously, candidates may view lessons, lectures and course materials, such as PowerPoint presentations and syllabi, at their leisure. Synchronous courses, however, require scheduled attendance through online chats or conferencing to allow real-time interaction, evaluation, assessment, and to judge the attention of learners. At present, no tool enables such interactions, focused on evaluating, in real-time, students' attention and preparation, assess their comprehension, and gather students' feedback.
Web conferencing platforms (e.g., Zoom, Google Hangout, Skype, etc.) are incapable of delivering data collection in this way, and no existing data collection platforms (e.g., SurveyMonkey, Typeform, etc.) are able to provide web conferencing. LOQUID solves this market gap through the integration of web conferencing with a live assessment tool focusing on both qualitative and quantitative data collection.
LOQUID is a tool that will allow teachers and professors to easily create and share web-conference rooms with multiple students, and create and distribute on-demand augmented questionnaires in real-time to assess students' preparation and understanding while attending online classes. Thanks to the extension for impact we will also be able to serve the research community and allow academic users performing more research-based tasks, by permitting data to be collected interactively while performing remote video calls with research participants.
During the POC1 we have delivered the necessary technical integration to demonstrate that Quodit can be integrated with an open-source web-conference system, delivering value to our users, both hosts (lecturers) and participants (students). We will focus the POC2 implementation around:
- improving the UI
- improving data visualisation options and handling, including:
a) allowing selection of options for numeric vs categorical data
b) more intuitive options for selection of data visualisations
c) better integration of visualisations with room recordings
- automatic conversion of session recordings to a downloadable .mp4 format
- breakout rooms, with Quodit support
- interactive whiteboard
- options for host to disable participants' webcams by default
- option for host to upload presentations persistently to a room
- option for host to activate and deactivate the presentation
- stress testing on production server environment