Enabling Communication and Feedback in Mass Lectures

It is hard to accomplish effective communication and discussions in lectures with many participants. Most of in-class-eLearning systems, which try to facilitate interaction, only provide partial solutions. For instance clicker systems are good for votes and polls, but cannot foster qualified communication between students and lecturers. In this paper, we give reasons to use such a qualified tool and present a microblog system, MiRA, which offers various communication possibilities inside and outside the classroom. MiRA has been developed specifically to support mass lectures and has been tested at NameX University. We present major development steps and the results of surveys and system evaluations.