Mobile Voting Systems for Creating Collaboration Environments and Getting Immediate Feedback: A New Curriculum Model of a University Lecture

Introduction

ICT integration into teaching and learning is one of the pivotal trends of modernization of higher education in the Russian Federation. The new national standards of higher education which were introduced in 2011-2012 contain several references to the use of ICT: modern technologies and web resources have to become an integral part of the curriculum; student ICT competence is included into both professional and research competencies and skills; 65% of all classes should be conducted in an interactive learning environment - webinars, slide presentations, round table discussions, case studies - whereas the lectures traditional for Russian universities are to constitute no more than 35% of all classes (Titova, 2012).

Without any doubt, higher education institutions and universities do not have to be driven only by imperatives, ICT procurement strategies and plans for the development of their estates. It is possible to transform institutional strategies by building continual research on student practices with technology into the practice of teaching and by creating environments where students and teachers are in ongoing dialogue (Kukulska-Hulme & Jones, 2011a). When students arrive at university they already have certain skills and competences in a variety of practices related to learning and the use of digital and networked technologies. Therefore educators have, first of all, to meet the expectations of a new generation of young learners who are commonly referred as the Net Generation (Tapscott, 2009) and Digital Natives (Prensky, 2009) whose perception of the responsibilities and roles of themselves in relation to lecturers and universities has changed drastically. Teachers who would like to make creative use of new technologies and to support collaborative, learner-oriented environments need to follow a transformational approach to the development of traditional skills alongside digital literacies (Dudeney, Hockly, Pegrum, 2013). This approach has to be viewed as the transformation of education from “a contrived performance, on a stage, to a shared experience of a contingent reality that no-one, lecturer or student, has experienced before” (Traxler, 2010, p.14).

This paper, supported by both current m-learning theory and enquiry-based learning theory, focuses on working out a new educational design of the university lecture within a high level collaboration environment.