Introducing Backstage - a digital backchannel for large class lectures

This article reports on the conception of a novel digital backchannel, project 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. Backstage allows for the aggregation of student's opinions aiming at supporting the community building of the audience and strengthening the students' awareness of and co-responsibility for the class work. The backchannel further supports immediate concise feedback to the lecturer of selected and aggregated students' opinions making it possible to strengthen the lecturer's awareness for students' difficulties. The backchannel's conception is motivated by learning sciences' findings and theories. This article is an extended version of (Bry et al., 2011) published at the IADIS International Conference e-Society, held in March 2011 in Avila, Spain.