Quail, or Questions You Ask in Lecture, is a web-based platform for live Q&A in the lecture setting. Using Quail, students may submit questions during the course of a lecture and self-moderate by upvoting questions they also want answered, or downvoting questions that are inappropriate. Unlike other Q&A apps on the market, Quail implements lexical analysis to minimize question redundancy by prompting students to compare their query to similar existing ones. At the end of class, the lecturer can choose to answer the top questions — determined by our ranking algorithm — and archive their answers for future reference, and students are prompted to provide feedback to facilitate even greater communication between course staff and students.
We also anticipate that Quail can expand to the social setting as students answer each other’s questions about student life through crowdsourced information exchange.