Increasing student engagement in higher education using a context-aware Q&A teaching framework

Modeling in Software Engineering is a complex task which includes interaction and discussion. Often multiple iterations are needed to end up with a satisfying design to handle given problems like complexity or change. This behavior can also be seen in education in software engineering, where learners tend to iterate over their models after having multiple discussions with their instructors or peers about possible solutions. This is an important part of the learning process, however, it is increasingly harder to implement for large scale on campus courses due to high student to lecturer ratios. One of the biggest problems is that lecturers are not able to allocate their time during class to support all students equally. This issue leads to new teaching methodologies and automated or semi-automated tools to support in-class interaction of students. However, these tools are lacking an automated mapping between questions asked and the teaching context provided. This context has to be inserted manually or is implicitly available during the lecture, however is lost after the lecture is over. In this paper we describe the adaption of a lecture-style instruction and the introduction of a context-aware Q&A teaching framework to increase student interaction by parallelizing it with content delivery. We achieve this while also lowering barriers for students to participate, even in multi-classroom setups. The stated approach also allows the creation of a knowledge repository which persists student interaction including its teaching context. This repository can be used by students to prepare for upcoming exams as well as by instructors to optimize their teaching content. Using our approach, we are able to show that there is an increase in student participation, leading to increased student examination performance for active students.