stARS: Proposing an Adaptable Collaborative Learning Environment to Support Communication in the Classroom.

The usage of technology provides a powerful opportunity to support classic classroom scenarios. In addition to improve the presentation of a lecturer's content, technical tools are able to increase the communication to the students or between students. Although many approaches exist that are able to support such interactions, the lecturer has to adjust his/her teaching strategy to the corresponding system. To overcome this problem, our goal is to allow lecturers to create their personal scenarios in an intuitive manner. As a solution, we propose an approach called stARS (scenario-tailored Audience Response System) that builds on top of a uniform (meta-)model. It provides a graphical editor as a user interface to create customized application models that represent teaching scenarios. In addition to classic Audience Response functions such as learning or survey questions, collaborative functionality is provided - specifically, group formations with associated interactions within these groups (e.g., discussion or voting functionalities) are examined. In order to evaluate our approach, in the first step, a user study was conducted to reason about the average user's modeling abilities with the graphical editor. Next, we target to evaluate both the functionality and the opportunities of our created prototype in real-life scenarios.