Agora: Motivating and Measuring Engagement in Large-Class Discussions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cold calling effectively incentivizes all students to actively prepare contributions to a class discussion, but some find it terrifying. Rewarding voluntarily speaking in class is less off-putting, and can be valuable for students who participate; however, it can allow a large fraction of the class to disengage. Agora is an open-source app designed to serve as a middle ground between these extremes, with the added benefit that it automatically produces an assessment of each student's engagement. The key ideas are to give students control over whether their hand is raised or lowered, to choose randomly among students with raised hands, and to give participation credit to all students who were considered every time a speaker is chosen. The system has various other features to facilitate deployment in large classes including multiple queues to support concurrent questions on different topics; a message board to allow students to communicate discretely with the instructor; and polling. We deployed the system in three offerings of a large undergraduate class and demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of learning outcomes, gender balance in participation, and student satisfaction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".