An instructional practice based on handwritten answer sheets with a course management system

Since the start of the 21st century, information technology (IT) was introduced in many universities to support effective instruction. One solution intended to support STEM classes took the form of a classroom management system, such as DyKnow Vision™, which was different from a course management system (CMS), such as Moodle™. This may be because HTML editors on web-based CMSs do not easily allow both instructors and students to produce freehand scientific information such as equations, charts, and illustrations. However, classroom management systems require special devices such as Tablet PCs and force instructors to perform complex system operations. Moreover, in some cases these systems are not necessarily designed to accumulate learning activities for ABET or e-Portfolio. To support both writing by hand and the accumulation of learning activities in a class, the system proposed here, developed on the basis of the key concept of “No special devices in a class,” makes use of sheets of paper and digitizes the papers after the class so that they can be stored in a CMS. A multifunctional peripheral with a digital watermark enables this educational setting. Our demonstration experiment for three classes functioned well. This paper presents a system overview and the preliminary results.