The Effectiveness of Using Cloud-Based Cross-Device IRS to Support Classical Chinese Learning

Introduction How to host and create interaction among students and teachers in class has always been an important challenge for course instructors (Pond, 2010; Wang, 2015). For the past few decades, technology-enhanced learning tools such as the Clicker technology (Lin, Liu, & Chu, 2011), the Interactive Response System (IRS) (Pond, 2010) or mobile-based applications for interactive response learning (Chuang, 2015; Stowell, 2014) have helped teachers overcome these challenges and have promoted students' engagement and learning interaction in class. The basic components of the above-mentioned technology are hand-held transmitters and receivers that are used for delivering and receiving responses between teachers and learners, and software installed on teachers' computers to present students' responses to questions (Pond, 2010). The use of Clickers, IRS or interactive applications has the advantage of motivating participants to become more engaged than when such systems are not used in the classroom (Heaslip, Donovan, & Cullen, 2013) while real-time interactive systems help learners achieve better learning performance (Pond, 2010). Research has also indicated that adopting a student response system in the classroom benefits learners' engagement, motivation and learning (Wang, 2015), and the use of IRS can p lay a key role in delivering pedagogical outcomes that motivate students to become more attentive and involved in class (Heaslip, Donovan, & Cullen, 2013). Nevertheless, there are some limitations to the above-mentioned educational technology tools (Clicker, IRS and App-based systems) including the effort required to administer the system environment (Barber et al., 2007), the cost of special devices such as clickers (Boatright-Hortwitz, 2009), the price of installing specific interactive software (Keough, 2012), the time cost of setting up the IRS environment in the limited class time (Keough, 2012), and teachers' need for particular technology skills training before adopting the technology in their classrooms for both software and hardware installation (Wang, 2015). However, the most important problem is that each brand of clicker or mobile-based IRS application only accepts particular information sending devices (Stowell, 2014), meaning that if an IRS App is developed for smartphones, learners could not send information from computer-based equipment, or if the IRS App is developed for the iOS system, learners with Android phones could not participate in the IRS activity. Chinese teaching in school includes modern and classical Chinese learning. The purpose of Modern Chinese learning focuses on language skills for daily use, while the Ministry of Education in Taiwan (Ministry of Education, 2013) announced that the purpose of classical Chinese learning is to promote students' abilities of classical Chinese culture learning, reading comprehension, appreciation and learning motivation. Research has indicated that through the comprehension and memorization of classical Chinese, learners improve their capability of reading and writing modern Chinese (Chen, 2003). However, the wording and sentence construction of classical Chinese are much more complicated than in modern Chinese, so how to engage senior high students' motivation for classical Chinese learning in lecture classes, and further, how to encourage students to achieve self-directed learning are still issues that need to be explored (Chiang, 2014). Research purpose and questions Several studies have investigated the potential use of interactive learning technology in fostering learning (Pond, 2010, Wang, 2015); however, there are some limitations of IRS, especially for cross-device usage, and the setup fees of the hardware and software system environments are high (Barber et al., 2007). To date, not many studies have made attempts to address the effectiveness of integrating cloud-based techniques to assist learning. …