Scaling Up Interactive Learning for Large Lectures (100 - 1000+ Students)

Whether it’s a sea of students in a large lecture hall or a grid of faces on a live-stream, MobLab understands the challenges in engaging students and promoting active learning to a wide audience. MobLab offers interactive elements that drive direct student feedback and participation even in lectures with over 1,000 students (in-person or online).

Playlists

MobLab activities can be used in lectures or as independent exercises. Set up an In-Class Playlist to run activities in live sessions, or create Online Assignments to build a set of self-paced learning activities for students to complete outside of class time.

Online Assignments make it easy to bundle games together with instructions, debriefings, and reflection surveys so students can benefit from experiential learning outside of class time. This offers flexibility for hybrid and online classes where it may be more difficult to run activities in a live session.

Watch Professor Robert Gazzale demo Assignments in action!

Attendance

Easily take attendance in your class to ensure that students are where they are supposed to be. (Learn more about taking attendance)

Surveys

A survey is an excellent way to ask the class questions to motivate participation or to receive feedback. For instance, ask students to think through a challenging problem prior to learning a new concept, or submit questions they have on the material covered in class. You can run surveys live during lecture or as homework assignments. Surveys can also be used for assessment as they can be graded automatically by setting correct answers and points. (Learn more about creating custom surveys)

Results from a survey can be viewed at any time while the survey is running or upon its completion. This allows for on-demand teaching and an instant evaluation of student comprehension. You can also configure surveys to allow revisions before submission or to reveal correct answers after submission.

The survey library contains many pre-built activities including demonstrations of cognitive biases and risk elicitation tasks from experimental economics. There are also question banks that cover a wide range of topics from principles of microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Games

Hands-on learning has repeatedly been shown to be one of the most effective ways to teach. With MobLab’s games, students are in the driver’s seat as the decision maker in situations that are designed to teach them. Our large selection of games is grounded in economic research and comes with instructions and teaching guides written by economists. Games can help motivate concepts, deepen understanding, and encourage students to interact with one another. Full game modules, which include motivation questions and assessments, are also available for some games. (Learn more about teaching with games)

Games and experiments can produce striking results when you run them with large groups of students. For example, our Market, Public Good, and Tragedy of the Commons games support groups of hundreds of players. (Learn more about configuring games)

Upon completion of a game, results are generated that can be used for discussion. Data can also be downloaded for further analysis if desired. (Learn more about accessing game results)

Robotic Players

During in-class play, you may add intelligent robot players to any unfilled game group to help ensure all students have a chance to participate.

Results Debriefing and Discussion

Post-activity discussions and result debriefing are integral to making the lessons and activities resonate with students. As a starting point, view an activity's instructor guide for suggestions on how you can use our built-in result graphs and tables to teach students key learning objectives using the data. After game-play, you can use surveys to ask students reflection and concept check questions to gauge their understanding of learning objectives.

Modules

Full game modules, which include motivation questions and comprehension assessments, are available for some games. Modules are bundled with an instructor’s guide that covers the lesson plan, learning objectives, and results debriefing.

(Learn more about using modules)