SUV: Students’ Understanding Visualizer to Support Instructors in Synchronous Online Lectures

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, university instructors shifted their classes online to ensure the continuation of numerous students’ learning. Although researchers created and evaluated tools to support students and instructors in classes in various settings, the tools to help university instructors in synchronous online education are still under-examined. To fill this gap, we introduce Students’ Understanding Visualizer (SUV), a system that visualizes students’ understanding in real-time during synchronous online lectures. To explore instructors’ experience and SUV ’s usability, we conducted a lab-based usability session with eight university instructors in South Korea by asking them to perform a series of tasks with SUV and share their experience. The interview results of this study revealed the benefits SUV would give in actual synchronous online lectures by delivering students’ understanding of lectures to instructors. Moreover, we found instructors’ challenges in using our system and potential features to be added to SUV to enhance the users’ experience. Based on the findings, we propose design opportunities for creating tools that allow instructors to give synchronous online lectures more effectively and in interactive ways.

Keywords

• Distance learning
• instructors
• online lectures
• students’ understanding
• visualization