Backchannel of Interactions in Class

The main issue addressed in this paper is how to promote the interactions between instructor and students, and among students in class. Our approach to this issue is to provide students with micro sharing tool such as Twitter. The micro sharing tool enables the users to write in a short sentence what they think to share. Introducing it into class could encourage the students to write what they want to ask the instructor, note, and share with other students, which could accordingly play a role as back channel of the interactions in the class. This paper describes a framework for activating the interactions in class with Twitter where the students use Twitter to share what they are thinking about the lecture with the instructor and with other students. Although the instructor could obtain fruitful information for improving his/her lecture in real time from the tweets the students submit with Twitter, it would be hard to extract it in case the number of the tweets obtained becomes large. In this paper, we accordingly demonstrate a system where the tweets obtained from the students are classified according to the contents and intention so that the instructor can improve his/her lecture.