Unobtrusive Student Collaboration during Lectures with Smartphones

The lecture is still the primary teaching and learning form in university and will remain so due to its cost-effectiveness. However, student disengagement caused by the traditional didactic style of lecture - with its one-way information flow allowing little or no interaction - prevents some students from taking full advantage of this learning paradigm. Some work has been done to address this issue by re-designing lectures to incorporate more lecturer and-student interaction, but has yet to be widely adopted. In this paper, we present an approach to applying a student-centred collaborative learning pedagogy into the lecture environment through a novel real-time collaborative note-taking application GroupNotes which encourages students to proactively engage themselves by means of student-andstudent interaction on smartphones. Benefits of this small group interaction is reducing the feeling of isolation that students feel in large lecture theatres through a sense of belonging as well as the incentive to remain on task through peer pressure from within that group.