The integration of technology into STEM education has been shown to increase classroom interaction and thus has the potential to improve student's learning. However, current approaches are designed to support specific scenarios and therefore have predefined functional scopes and limitations. This results in lecturers having to adjust their preferred teaching strategy to the currently used system. Hence, our goal is to allow lecturers to customize the system's functionality to their strategy in mind. As a solution, we created a prototype called stARS (scenario-tailored Audience Response System) that builds on top of a uniform metamodel and allows lecturers to create customized teaching scenarios using a graphical editor. First user studies have confirmed that users with different modeling abilities are able to understand the metamodel and use the graphical editor. In order to demonstrate the intuitive use of our prototype, this paper presents concepts to support both the starting phase and modeling of complex scenarios. However, an implementation in real-life scenarios has to be conducted to show its applicability.

This is an exploratory study conducted to assess the way in which social media could enhance the experience for audiences of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) television drama. This study focused on Facebook and Twitter since they are two of the top five social media networks that are popular in the country and which have the potential to offer television more mileage in terms of communicating with its audience and extending its reach. The guiding theory for this study was uses and gratifications theory. This theory was employed to assist in assessing the opportunities that exist for SABC television drama, as well as to assess the ways in which the audience believe social media could be helpful in interacting with SABC television drama. The results for this study are interesting in that the majority of respondents believed that having a hashtag on screen during a drama broadcast would help to increase interactivity with the programme, as it could help direct audiences to the correct interactive space for that programme and they would be able to share their ideas and comments on the drama directly with the producers, making feedback immediate. It was interesting to note that the respondents believed that they could interact with SABC television drama for information relating to the story. The findings suggest that SABC television drama needs to actively adopt social media in its programmes for maximum interaction. There is also the need for an understanding of how they Facebook and Twitter could be embedded in SABC drama. / Communication Science / M.A. (Communication Science)