Cerego is an adaptive online learning tool that has been designed to facilitate smart training of basic knowledge. For every user, an algorithm determines which items have to be repeated how often and when. Items you have trouble with will come back more often than the ones you know better. In addition to question types for learning meanings, Cerego also offers possibilities for simple application questions and creating informative pages.
Cerego visualises how far the students are with learning the materials. Cerego works with different levels of ‘mastery’, where the level determines how long students hold onto the knowledge. (Level 1 = a few days, level 2 = a few weeks etc.). As lecturer, you can select a certain level as goal. The personal learning curve can also be viewed by the student.
Cerego can be accessed in a browser. It also has a useful app for students, which gives push notifications when it is time for a (short) learning session.
You can use Cerego to make sure students master the basic knowledge of a course: concepts, definitions, historical periods, phases in a development model and so on. This means that there will be more time during the contact hours to focus on in-depth studying of the materials, application of the acquired knowledge, and learning to judge critically. Using Cerego helps students to divide the study time more evenly across the duration of the course, because they start studying the material earlier.
Cerego also creates space for the assessment: because the knowledge transfer happens formatively during the course, the final assessment can focus on application of the material. Cerego can also be used to actively refresh knowledge or knowledge components in preparation for a thesis or for premaster students.
At the education institute Pedagogic Sciences lecturers reported during the pilot phase that they noticed that students had a better knowledge of the terminology, partially mastered it, and that this benefited the conversations during the seminars.
The use of Cerego during the course ‘Analysis of music, text and image’ was voluntary for the students. Students were more inclined to use the tool when the workings were explained beforehand. About half of the students has used Cerego for the duration of the course, the other half has used Cerego in preparation for the exam. The students were very positive about the use of the tool. The use of Cerego as a tool to refresh basic knowledge has been considered as something positive by the premaster students from Arts and Culture Studies. The lecturer team now wants to use Cerego for more courses.