In the course Analysis of music, text and image, students have to learn a generous amount of theoretical concepts. Students need a basic knowledge of definitions, characteristics, concepts and theories to analyse texts, musical pieces and movies. The lecturer that taught text analysis wanted to spend a larger part of the contact time practicing analysing texts and discussing the matter with which students could be struggling. This is why we assisted him with the implementation of Cerego.
Cerego is an adaptive learning tool designed to assist in acquiring basic knowledge on a subject. An algorithm will decide for every user which items should be practiced during what a certain amount of time and how often it should be repeated. Difficult items will be repeated more often than items that are made flawlessly, these items differ for every person. Besides question types that help with learning definitions, Cerego also offers simple practical questions.
In the teacher dashboard, the lecturer could see the items that students were struggling with the most. This resulted in a better view of the students’ prior knowledge on the subject. The lecturer spent more time on the subjects. Students were enthusiastic about Cerego and thought it was a good aid to study and prepare for the exam.
Students were not obligated to use Cerego. The first time, around half of the students in the course used the tool during the semester. The other half of the students only used it to prepare for the exam. The second time, the course became more extensive and Cerego was explained better. This led to an increase in the use of Cerego during the course. The lecturer is going to improve his sets and sees a future in using Cerego as means to test the students’ basic knowledge. He wants to use Cerego for an assessment in knowledge reproduction, so the final exam will only include application questions and the workload will be more spread out throughout the semester.
De department of Cultural Studies would like to use Cerego to enrich multiple courses in their curriculum. The practice sets will stay available for students, so they can refresh their basic knowledge when they will start their Bachelor thesis. Students in the premaster program have used Cerego for this and have confirmed its usefulness.
- Labels: case_studies
- First published:
