Assessing Backstage—A backchannel for collaborative learning in large classes

To reduce the passivity of students in large lectures, we propose to enhance the classroom with the digital backchannel Backstage, which aims at promoting awareness and participation. We tested Backstage in a preliminary user study at a relatively early stage of development. Besides gaining first impressions of usability, we were particularly interested in the kinds of questions raised on Backstage and how they correlate to the participants' attitudes towards questioning. The study confirms known issues regarding questioning that are not fully overcome with the tested prototype. Thus it is concluded that the concept of Backstage needs to be extended in order to embrace remedial assistance in how to ask adequate questions during lectures.