News

Cloud Class Room Built by NTNU Team Selected as Horizon Report Exemplar Institution

With the advancement of internet and smart devices, a team of National Taiwan Normal University developed a "Cloud Class Room". Using smart phones and tablets with internet access, students in the class can answer or express ideas in class. Teachers can Immediately know the learning situation of students, thus have a more effective teaching environment. The system has been online for more than 4 years. The system is available in 15 languages with more than 60,000 teachers and students registered worldwide with more than 500,000 records. CCR is recognized as Horizon Report Exemplar Institution in 2019, which was selected from over 60 submissions from various institutions in the United States and internationally. Before, the teacher often ask onstage if there’s any question and only get a silent response. Some teacher would ask students to write notes if they have any questions. This is not only time consuming but also ineffective.

2020 International Conference on Technological and Vocational Education at NTNU

The 2020 International Conference on Technological and Vocational Education was held by the Department of Industrial Education of NTNU on January 4th. Lin Teng Chiao, Administrative Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Education, and Le Thai Hung, Dean of Faculty of Quality Management, University of Education, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Siririt Petsangsri, Director of the Department of Industrial Education of King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang and Hanief Saha Ghafur, Chairman of Education at Central Board of Nahdlatul Ulama were invited as keynote speakers. Scholars and experts from home and abroad gathered at NTNU to communicate and discuss about international cooperation in vocational education.

Dean of School of Learning Informatics Tsai Chin Chung Awarded Life-time National Chair Professor

Dean of School of Learning Informatics Tsai Chin Chung has been working on science education and internet learning for more than two decades. Recently, he was given the 23rd National Chair professorships, which is also his second one after 2014. The awarding ceremony will be held on January 20th. Dean Tsai, age 49, is the youngest Honorary life-time National Chair professor in history.

How Mobile Learning Can Support Global Student Engagement

An advanced version of a web-based instant response system, CloudClassRoom (CCR), which incorporates gaming features (competitive and mentally stimulating) entitled GEARS (Gamified Electronic Audience Response System), has been developed by Dr. Chun-Yen Chang’s research team. CCR-GEARS is written in HTML 5.0 and works on every Internet-capable device without software or plug-in installation. CCR enables teachers and students to participate in question-answering activities by using their own mobile devices, such as laptops, smartphones, or tablets. By this means, every student in the classroom can express their thoughts instantly as well as anonymously. CCR provides the teacher with a rough picture of student learning progress in real-time. Leveraging the capacity of mobile devices, CCR supports text and multimedia responses. We recently added a gaming feature (GEARS) to CCR, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first instance in the world of incorporating gamification into an Instant Response System. GEARS encompasses the following functions: 1) learners will gain points when providing a correct answer; 2) learners may use the earned points to exchange ‘weapons/props’ to answer the following questions; 3) the weapons/props enable the features of ‘time extension’, ‘option deletion’, ‘the whole-class answer patterns’ and ‘peek into someone else’s answer’; 4) a completion board is renewed after each question, and finally 5) winners are able to ‘make’ their public statements. There will be more gaming functions added, and research conducted about this new adventure. Findings suggest that CCR can stimulate students’ learning motivation and improve their achievement in science.

Foreign Students Celebrate Christmas at Magic Night of MTC

What’s so special about the magic night of MTC is that in addition to all kinds of performances, snacks, lucky draws, a reward card is given to all participants for them to collect points for MTC gifts. On the weekend before Christmas, Executive Director Chen Jenn Yeu led students caroling around the campus started from Bo Ai building. Vice President Frank Ying was attracted by their beautiful voice.