How can digital backchannels support student participation?

François Bry, Vera Gehlen-Baum, Alexander Pohl (2011) Promoting Awareness and  Participation in Large Class Lectures: The Digital Backchannel Backstage, Proceedings of the IADIS

This article reports on the conception of a novel digital backchannel, code name Backstage, dedicated to large classes aiming at empowering not only the audience but also the speaker, at promoting the awareness of both audience and speaker, and at promoting an active participation of students in the lecture. The backchannel supports different forms of inter-student communication via short microblog messages, social evaluation and ranking of messages by the students themselves, and aggregation of student’s opinions aiming at increasing the students’ community feeling, strengthening the students’ awareness of and co-responsibility for the class work aiming at promoting the students’ participation in the lecture. The backchannel further supports immediate concise feedback to the lecturer of selected and aggregated students’ opinions aiming at strengthening the lecturer’s awareness for students’ difficulties.

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