Tracking what students grasp
As a teaching assistant at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2010, Amit Maimon MBA ’11 witnessed the origins of a technological phenomenon: Smartphones and tablets had started creeping into the classroom in the hands of students. But instead of dismissing these devices as distractions, Maimon saw a way to leverage them to help teachers get a better idea of what students grasp during lectures. That year, Maimon co-developed Socrative, an app that lets teachers design or select premade quizzes for students to answer, publicly or anonymously, on personal mobile devices during lectures. The app is now being used by about 1.1 million teachers and millions of students across the globe. The idea is that students respond better to quizzes deployed via mobile devices — “which they’re already staring at,” Maimon says — and many feel more comfortable answering questions anonymously. For the teacher, the accumulated data gives immediate feedback on student...