A Backchannel for Large Class Lectures

Students attending large lectures in today’s universities encounter problems like an impersonal atmosphere, difficulty of individual participation and collaboration as well as shyness and passivity among the audience. The use of digital backchannels can increase interaction by providing awareness, which is defined as the understanding of the activities of others that provides a context for one’s own activity. An increase and improvement of the provided awareness in backchannels is considered as beneficial as it helps students to develop a shared sense of community, which has an impact on learning and interaction. An impersonal atmosphere in mediated communication can be counteract by increasing social presence, meaning the extent to which a person is perceived as real in the medium. This thesis explores ways of increasing and improving social presence and social awareness on Backstage, a digital backchannel for large class lectures. Amongst others, a concept is introduced that provides students with aggregated, topic-related information about themselves, the average user and fellow students. The student can see information about the amount of activity, the quality of contributions and the distribution of user-involvement on the backchannel. This way, a context can be built up that helps the students to contrast their own activity with that of their peers in order to draw conclusions about their behavior in the online environment. Backstage, enriched with the new concepts, is then compared to similar backchannel systems.