Sixteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge & Society

Abstract

In the Saudi education system, males and females study on separate campuses. This gender segregation is based on Islamic values and Saudi culture. To deal with this issue, a video-conference system (closed-circuit television) is being provided to support communication with female students on their campus by creating several units of the system in the male campus. Each unit of the system consists of a PC computer, a sound system, a document camera (doc-cam) and a video camera with a one-way video and a two-way audio broadcast. The main challenge of promoting active learning and students’ engagement in a female class, is that all lectures are taught by male instructors to the female students through a video-conference learning system with no physical interaction between the lecturers and their female students. Hence, the author combined a “BYOD” model with the Nearpod to create a new learning environment aiming to ease delivering teaching materials and to increase interactivity in the class. In order to stimulate students to involve in a learning activity, instructors’ pedagogical actions are very important to exploit the affordances of learning tools and learning environments (John & Sutherland, 2005). So, the present study aims to explore Nearpod as a tool to promote active learning and students’ engagement in higher education. Specifically, Nearpod, in this study, is regarded as a tool that can be used to enhance teaching and learning for those lectures provided by male instructors to female students at Sharoura College of Science and Arts, Najran University.