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Despite their flaws as teaching and learning environments, large lectures remain a standard teaching approach because of their relatively low cost, ease of preparation, and long tradition in education. Research shows that active inquiry yields positive results in learning outcomes, and one way to make the large lecture class more active and partici...
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... Most studies on backchannel show how educational environments have become backchannel's main focus, mainly to boost interaction and engagement in big spaces (Pohl et al., 2011;Aagard et al., 2010). Knight (2009) claims that backchanneling is the process through which a listener sends a signal to a speaker indicating their interest, attention, and comprehension. ...
The goal of this study is to use backchannels as a means of improving listening and speaking abilities. For this experimental study, a pre-post group design was employed. The study had two groups-24 female students were in the experimental group and 23 female students were in the control group. The control group's students received traditional instructions. In the experimental group, however, backchanneling strategies were taught. The researchers prepared the topics, which centered on three types of backchanneling, both verbal and nonverbal: (1) expressing interest and agreement, (2) expressing understanding, and (3) expressing sympathy. The students were trained to use these backchanneling strategies, working in groups and pairs with the instructors who worked as facilitators. The posttest scores using SPSS from students who had used backchannels in their listening and speaking were compared to those students who followed the traditional way using the assigned coursebooks. The control group's listening and speaking improvement was significantly better. The students in the group using the backchanneling strategies demonstrated favorable attitudes toward backchanneling. The study concludes with recommendations for increasing the use of backchanneling strategies among EFL students in listening and speaking classes to enhance their proficiency in English.
... Most studies on backchannel show how educational environments have become backchannel's main focus, mainly to boost interaction and engagement in big spaces (Pohl et al., 2011;Aagard et al., 2010). Knight (2009) claims that backchanneling is the process through which a listener sends a signal to a speaker indicating their interest, attention, and comprehension. ...
The goal of this study is to use backchannels as a means of improving listening and speaking abilities. For this experimental study, a pre-post group design was employed. The study had two groups-24 female students were in the experimental group and 23 female students were in the control group. The control group's students received traditional instructions. In the experimental group, however, backchannelling strategies were taught. The researchers prepared the topics, which centered on three types of backchanneling, both verbal and nonverbal: (1) expressing interest and agreement, (2) expressing understanding, and (3) expressing sympathy. The students were trained to use these backchanneling strategies, working in groups and pairs with the instructors who worked as facilitators. The posttest scores using SPSS from students who had used backchannels in their listening and speaking were compared to those students who followed the traditional way using the assigned coursebooks. The control group's listening and speaking improvement was significantly better. The students in the group using the backchanneling strategies demonstrated favorable attitudes toward backchanneling. The study concludes with recommendations for increasing the use of backchanneling strategies among EFL students in listening and speaking classes to enhance their proficiency in English.
... While Question and Answer approaches have been known for a long time (cf. [1]) and were extended frequently (e.g., by marking helpful answers or selecting a type of question [10,4]), they are designed for collaborations between students of the entire classroom (or follow-up discussions between individual students) that run in the background of the lecture. ...
The use of collaborative learning (CL) has been found to be beneficial for helping students to learn more effectively compared to learning on their own. While CL was implemented successfully in various classroom scenarios, it is used more rarely in remote settings. Especially during the CoViD-19 pandemic and its resulting distance learning, students were often used to learn alone, without experiencing the advantages of CL. This is caused by various reasons, ranging from the required technical know-how, hardware, and Internet connection, to the novelty and lack of experience with these functions. Moreover, the type of the remote setting, e.g., the number of participating students, is a challenge, as, similar to traditional face-to-face settings, the lecturer cannot follow every discussion. Given these challenges, the goal of this paper was to investigate how and, more importantly, how successfully CL can be implemented in remote settings. Therefore, the use of a novel technical approach to implement CL in four different remote teaching scenarios was investigated and both the usage itself as well as the opinions of lecturers and students were recorded. In this way, this paper intends to make a valuable contribution to the study of CL in remote settings.KeywordsCollaborative learningPeer feedbackRemote teaching
... This might include prompting students to consider what resources will help them answer their questions, how they can seek help, and what approaches to studying will be most effective. Digital technologies that facilitate anonymous, real-time question sharing hold promise both for facilitating research on students' questions during instruction as well as a practically managing student-generated questions (Aagard et al., 2010;Crompton et al., 2018). ...
Question generation is theorized to support comprehension, self-regulation, and achievement, yet the empirical base for whether and how student-generated questions are associated with comprehension monitoring and whether they predict performance remain open questions. To address these, we investigated the questions undergraduate students in an introductory chemistry course recorded in question logs across an 8-lecture unit and their relations with post-lecture self-appraisals of comprehension and exam performance. Results indicated that students who generated more questions during lectures, who were able to resolve fewer of their questions, and who generated questions indicating large exam-relevant knowledge gaps reported lower levels of comprehension after lectures. Questions that sought verification or disambiguation were positively associated with exam performance. Findings suggest that student-generated questions can be meaningful indicators of comprehension monitoring processes and academic performance.
... While lecturers talk at the front of a class, students can also communicate with each other. These two simultaneous types of communication are called the frontchannel and backchannel (Aagard, Bowen, & Olesova, 2010) with the frontchannel referring to the lecturer communicating to the class and the backchannel referring to the communication the students have among each other. Lecturers have used chat tools to leverage backchannel communication with the goal of enabling student discussion of each other's questions regarding the lecture. ...
Digital technologies have gained much popularity in education thanks to the cost efficiency they gain through scalability. While the acceptance of some of these new digital technologies has been investigated, there are few direct comparisons. The most established model for measuring acceptance is the technology acceptance model, which can predict the behavioral intention to use the technology. We compared four digital learning technologies (e-lectures, classroom response system, classroom chat, and mobile virtual reality) in terms of their technology acceptance. The classroom response system had the highest level of acceptance. It was closely followed by e-lectures, then the classroom chat and then mobile virtual reality. The students evaluated all tools favorably before and after usage, except for mobile virtual reality, which saw a substantial drop in perceived usefulness and behavioral intention after 3 months’ usage.
... Instructors may also improve student motivation and engagement by using a backchannel, a secondary, digital conversation taking place simultaneously with college lectures (e.g., the chat function in Zoom). These backchannels have been shown to provide a social aspect to classes and increase student engagement (28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33). Specifically, backchannels have been shown to increase the frequency of questions asked and to diversify the demographics of students who ask the questions (34). ...
In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic altered instructional and learning strategies at institutions across the globe. This emergency transition to remote instruction (ETRI) resulted in ambiguity regarding what to teach, how to teach, and instructor and student workload. We report on a survey-based study of 44 community college (CC) faculty at 16 institutions, with the aim of documenting how our CC faculty colleagues perceived the ETRI, the challenges they faced, and the resources that were-or would have been-most helpful. We conclude with recommendations, in the words of participating faculty, to address prevailing concerns voiced by these instructors: namely, the lack of student-faculty interactions in the online space, concerns about student access to resources, and the demand for authentic research and lab experiences.
... Mobile backchannel systems such as Hotseat (Aagard et al., 2010), Backstage (Pohl et al., 2011), ActiveClass (Ratto et al., 2003), and ClasCommons (Du et al., 2012) were investigated. They are applications that allow students to use their smartphones to ask questions, vote on questions from their peers, respond to polls set by the lecturer, and give feedback to the lecturer during a lecture session. ...
When presenting to a large group of students, either in an amphitheatre or through an online platform, effectively connecting to the audience – understanding how well the audience is following the presentation and taking appropriate actions promptly if they experience difficulties – is a serious challenge. Backchannel systems are sometimes deployed to address this issue by allowing audience to give feedback to the presenter without interrupting the current discourse. However, these systems are not designed to immediately aggregate and present the audience's feedback to the presenter in a meaningful way that is easy to quickly digest. To fill this gap, we have explored a proof-of-concept method for analysing the emotions and sentiments from the audience's feedback in real time and displaying to the presenter a morale graph showing a trend of the audience's overall reaction over time. This allows a presenter to effectively connected to their audience in real time, knowing whether their presentation is going well and what issues their audience may have in common at any specific moment. We have further implemented this method in an educational context, using a prototype backchannel system, known as ClasSense, for a lecturer to effectively connect to their students. This paper presents the evaluation of this system, which shows that lecturers accept and prefer the morale graph based user interface developed over other backchannel user interfaces that display all posts in chronological order. Students also positively expressed their agreement that the system not only makes their feedback an important part of the class but also increases their interactions with the lecturers. This is further confirmed with a Markov chain predicting the probability that students’ and lecturers’ survey results lead to their overall positive sentiment towards the tool. The flexibility of the ClasSense system suggests it may also be suitable in contexts other than education.
... Whilst being a useful lecture tool, the activity and interaction created is one that is confined to the time and space of the lecture (Tormey and Henchy 2008). Nevertheless, the use of mobile devices as an accepted platform for student engagement (whilst debated initially) is now well established and widely accepted (Aagard, Bowen, and Olesova 2010;Ciampa 2014;Gikas and Grant 2013). ...
This article analyses the pilot of an anonymous question and answer mobile application with a large cohort of undergraduate students (460) enrolled on an Operations Strategy Management module. The mobile application allowed students to pose anonymous questions to both peers and staff, create replies and vote on questions posted by other users. The aim of the pilot was to evaluate how this application could be used to enhance communication, engagement and student learning both inside and outside of class time to overcome some of the challenges presented by large cohort teaching. An initial evaluation was undertaken exploring both the analytics attached to the platform and a thematic analysis of the posts. The initial findings of the pilot were positive, with the majority of students installing and regularly accessing the application with use increasing over time. The questions posed demonstrated engagement beyond surface-level memorisation of module content, and there were indications that the application could be beneficial in supporting student community awareness and interaction within large cohorts.
... HotSeat [1] allows to post and vote on messages using Twitter and text messages during and after class. It was evaluated by over 2000 students and results show that it increases student engagement and is used more often by higher-performing students. ...
Improving face-to-face (f2f) interaction in large classrooms is a challenging task as student participation can be hard to initiate. Thanks to the wide adoption of personal mobile devices, it is possible to blend digital and face-to-face interaction and integrate
co-located social media
applications in the classroom. To better understand how such applications can interweave digital and f2f interaction, we performed a detailed analysis of real-world use cases of a particular co-located social media app: SpeakUp. In a nutshell, SpeakUp allows the creation of temporary location-bound chat rooms that are accessible by nearby users who can post and rate messages anonymously. We find that the use of co-located social media is associated with an increase in content-related interaction in the class. Furthermore, it is associated with an increase in the perceived learning outcomes of students compared to a control group. We further provide design guidelines to blend digital and f2f interaction using co-located social media in the classroom based on 11 case studies covering over 2,000 students.
... The majority of research on digital backchannels in large settings explores the specific platforms for computer-mediated communication, such as Backstage (Pohl et al., 2011), backchan.nl (Harry, Green, & Donath, 2009), and Hotseat, (Aagard et al., 2010). These research studies are examples of how educational settings have become the focus of backchannels, specifically with attempts at increasing engagement and interactivity in large venues. ...
This study explores the use of backchannels, real-time online conversations taking place simultaneously with spoken discussions (the front channel), as one approach to meaning-making through discussion. Using transcripts of front and backchannel discussions, we examine how undergraduate preservice teachers utilize backchannels to talk about class-assigned texts. Although previous research has suggested that backchannels can create distractions, our study found that participants within the backchannel groups were able to create meaning through their interactions. We used five types of talk (analytic, personal, intertextual, transparent, and performative) to aid in our analysis. While we found evidence of all types of talk in the transcripts, analytical talk dominated the conversations, suggesting that backchannels can indeed encourage close readings of texts. In addition, we found that the nature of the online environment created a sixth category of talk. This type of talk, which we called negotiation, allowed participants in the backchannel to define and react to the digital space they interacted within. Findings point to increased engagement in class discussion and the potential of backchannels as a way to effectively integrate technology into instruction.
