Major Upgrade of the Presentation Education Assistance System (PEAS) and its Extensive Application to Educational Fields

This Innovative Practice Category Work-In-Progress Paper presents modifications of the existing Presentation Education Assistance System (PEAS) in order to expand application domain from STEM to STEAM based educational fields. In the previous study, the efficacy of the existing PEAS in assessing students’ individual presentation skills was presented. In this study, the feasibility of evaluating students’ critical thinking skills and group activities by the upgraded PEAS was examined. The study also aimed to confirm usefulness and acceptability of the upgraded PEAS in various academic disciplines including engineering and liberal arts. The results showed that the use of the upgraded PEAS enabled master’s STEM students to improve their critical thinking skills. Also, the upgraded PEAS became capable of evaluating group presentations as well as individual speech in the group activity of liberal art students. Furthermore, the upgraded PEAS realized active classroom interaction by integrating with Learning Management System (LMS) using IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability). From these results, effectiveness and acceptability of the upgraded PEAS for both individuals and student’s groups in not only STEM but also STEAM based educational field were confirmed.