Although for many years there has been a growing awareness around the world of the necessary essential changes in education systems, there is no consensus on what or how to do it. However, the belief, which stems from cognitive and constructivist theories of learning, that the student needs to be placed at the center of the learning process dominates. Nevertheless, active learning is still a rarity in practice. COVIDOM-19-induced teaching constraints have accelerated the application of ICT, the Internet, video lessons, and video transmission of lectures. Nevertheless, lectures remain the dominant way of teaching either in live teaching or at a distance. At the same time, one-way transmission of information is still predominant. It is necessary to change passive lectures into interactive ones, which will start a more active role of students in the educational process. Frequent and appropriate asking questions to students and encouraging them to seek solutions to problems raised by the teacher, as well as encouraging them to ask spontaneous questions during lectures can significantly raise the quality of acquired knowledge and understanding. The obstacle to this is the personal inexperience of teachers in active learning and the unaccustomedness of students to asking questions and actively seeking answers. The project proposes the development of an innovative tool to encourage interactivity in the AudIT lecture that will have properties not found in the currently available tools for testing knowledge and interaction. It will combine known properties and adapt them to the needs of students and teachers. Innovative features such as scoring unique answers, the ability for students to respond simultaneously both anonymously and under their own name, the ability to direct answers to any application such as mind maps and games will significantly raise students' motivation to actively participate in the lecture. A series of innovative solutions will facilitate the application of tools to teachers regardless of the educational situation, environment and technological equipment in which they find themselves. The innovativeness of the tool is that its use will not require maintenance or expansion of server resources when used by a very large number of users. The primary target group of project beneficiaries are subject teachers in primary and secondary schools. The partner schools in the project will create a core of 50 experienced practitioners who will create methodological guidelines for potential beneficiaries to give them concrete examples of knowledge and ideas on how to apply interactivity in their own teaching. To make it easier for teachers to use AudIT, the consortium partners will also develop an LMS (Learning Management System) with methodological instructions and examples. The LMS system will be designed as self-study material and will provide teachers with additional education and ideas on how to improve interactivity in the classroom with the use of AudIT. AudIT will also monitor interactive expert systems for use (text, recordings, video - designed as a decision tree that will easily and easily lead teachers to answers) and an interactive expert installation system (if teachers want to have a copy of AudIT on their own server - for reliability, adding functionality or privacy to student answers and questions). The project's website will contain text and video instructions, an expert system, and a database of good practice, as well as a directory of more experienced practitioners ready to help new interested teachers. The results of the project will be disseminated through education authorities, professional associations and the media to all EU countries and candidates. It is expected that the long-term results of the project will enable any interested teacher to increase the interactivity of their lectures and other educational activities. Thus, students will begin to take an active role in the process of acquiring knowledge, which leads to the achievement of higher educational outcomes.
The goal of the project is to improve interactivity in lectures. For this purpose, 47 new teaching methods were designed and developed, as well as the special tool AudiIT - with instructions for use and an interactive expert system. There are many software tools that teachers can use to check students' knowledge and ask questions, but each of them has at least some limitations. The first goal of the project is to develop and create AudIT (Audience Interactivity Tool), whose task is to help to activate students. It is a system that can work for a long time almost without maintenance, it can serve a large number of users, it allows instant questions and answers so that teachers and students can assess the level of knowledge before and during the lesson or discuss some challenges or ambiguities. Another goal of the project was to create practical methodological guides for use in the classroom in the subject groups of natural sciences, social sciences, language and literature, and personal development. The third goal of the project is to create a core of practitioners. During the project, teachers have used the tool in the classroom and developed methodological examples that form the basis for good practice.
Constructivism, inquiry and problem-based learning, project and teamwork are beginning to play a significant role in the new educational process. Nevertheless, active learning is slow to catch on in practice. The reason for this lies mainly in the one-sided transmission of information to students. The main reason is that teachers do not have personal experience with active learning and therefore often do not know how to change their teaching methods. Students also do not have the habit, courage and freedom to spontaneously give answers and ask questions. Having identified the need for a tool to increase interactivity in the classroom in Croatia, especially at the beginning of the pandemic COVID -19, Project Coordinator Aquilonis, through research and communication with teachers, established contact with project partners who also expressed the need for a tool that would enable them to: increase interactivity in the classroom, it can be used ad hoc, it is free, it is open to anyone who wants to use it, it is easy to use, it allows exporting answers to other tools, it recognizes similar answers and groups them so that it can be customized and personalized. The results of this project are: LMS with 47 examples of best practices, lessons for self-study, software solution AudIT and interactive expert system for installation and use.