Sensing the classroom: Improving awareness and self-awareness of students in Backstage

Backstage is a digital backchannel that is carefully designed for the use in large lecture classes. The goal of Backstage is to support social and active learning in a mainly impersonal and passive learning setting. In classes with a large and anonymous audience, passivity can be a cause of lowered awareness. This paper introduces Backstage and discusses its range of functions in the light of how it contributes to awareness. It furthermore introduces newly conceived concepts by which information are collected and properly displayed in order to help both students and lecturer to gain insight about who is around, what are the kinds of activities the community is engaged in, and what matters in the lecture.