Use of Smart Phone Applications and Purple Shirts to Enhance Student Engagement in Large Lectures?

The need to increase student engagement in large lectures has been addressed in a number of studies with this paper being one phase in an ongoing study into the use of applications on mobile devices to address this need. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a focus group conducted with a group of students from two courses where an application running on smart phones and similar devices was used to facilitate feedback from small group discussions during lectures. The motivation for this paper came from the need to triangulate some of the findings from earlier phases of the study relating to the importance of anonymity, issues surrounding requiring students to own devices like smart phones, the coverage of course content, not overusing the technology and the importance of lecturer feedback. The paper confirms findings of earlier phases of the study that surround the importance of feedback from lecturers and the significance of issues surrounding requiring students to own devices like smart phones. Light is also shed on the high importance of anonymity for some students. Issues surrounding the impact on time to cover course content and overusing similar technologies require further exploration. That the use of applications can serve to increase the enjoyment of learning also emerged and was related to an ongoing thread of interactions using an application across two semester that related to a purple shirt that was sometimes worn by one of the lecturers in the course.