Results are in for the first two surveys.

On a Likert scale of 1 to 5 students at the Faculty of Science answered positively with a 4.72 (BFW) and a 4.63 (LST) to the question whether they enjoyed using Cerego. They believe it helped them with studying for the subject (4.22; 4.13) and recommend that other professors use Cerego as well in their program (4.33; 4.38). Most students would welcome some more content (3.50; 4.19). Most of them believe the registered in time. This is arguable as registration numbers developed linearly with time and therefor many started rather late with learning.

In any case, the positive feedback is heart-warming and we happily continu with this project, adding new courses regularly and perhaps even more faculties.

Today we put out – for the first time – two surveys under students. For teh Biochemistry course of BioFarmaceutical Sciences and for the Celbiology & Biochemistry course of Life Science & Technology programs, we are using 5 questions only using ratings to get an idea on how these students liked having Cerego as an app to aid their studies. Looking forward to the response!

While we are in the middle of the Corona crisis, here is a quick update on the use of Cerego at Leiden….

In 2019, we started using Cerego at an Introductory Chemistry course – “General and Inorganic Chemistry”. While some of the 180 students registered for this class used the software package to memorize some definitions and names of complex ions, others did not. An extremely limited study on exam results showed no significant difference between students that did and did not use Cerego for exam questions that students could have prepared for using new Cerego content. Although this sounds disappointing, it is not! Exam results should not be influenced (much) by use of Cerego – it should only affect LONG TERM MEMORY, not the exam grade. As Cerego is not compulsory, the fact that it did not benefit Cerego users is, thus, a good thing!

At the start of 2000, Cerego was implemented at a course in the Medical Department on the anatomy on movement. Two student assistants created a large set of Cerego content based on high quality images of skeletal and muscular parts of the human body. In this class of over 300 students, about a third used Cerego regularly. From those, a significant subset was very enthousiastic and worked with the content passing the rather high retention level set at 3.0 for all content.

More recently,both the Biology and Computer Science departments hot interested in using Cerego. They are currently testing it for implementation in 2020 or 2021.

Finally, the BSc program in Archeology implemented Cerego. For the Material Science course, a large set of study materials were produced by the teachers and a student assistant. Approximately 70 students signed up for using Cerego. The course has just started.

Welcome to Leiden University Weblog on the implementation of Cerego – a mobile learing tool that we are introducing at Leiden University to assist students in learning and memorizing. This project is financed by the NRO under a Comenius Leadership Fellow Award. I received it in April 2019 on the basis of a proposal to implement and study mobile learning technology that primarily aims to increase retention of content from introductory courses of BSc programs.

We have chosen to use Cerego – a commercial mobile learning app – as it uses both distributed learning and retrieval practice. These two known effects in learning are combined with push technology and a user-friendly interface for students and teachers. The phone-based application runs on every platform and allows us easy access to metadata that we may use to study the relation between students’ use of Cerego, retention, and preformance on (written) examination. We are still working out some details with Cerego to get our campus-wide license in effect, but have already started implementing the use of Cerego at an introductory Chemistry course.

This blog keeps you up-to-date on the progress of our Comenius Leadership project and will refer you to upcoming publications of our results.