top of page

Backchannel Chat

Materials required
Implementation procedure
Strategy in practice

  • Devices (computer or tablet)

  • Internet connection

  1. Navigate to backchannelchat.com.

  2. Create an account or log in

  3. From here, you can create a chat room and name it in a few clicks.

  4. The room will have a unique URL. Write the URL on the board or distribute it to your students by another means. Instruct them to navigate to the site on their devices.

  5. They will need to log in with their names - their real names or an alias, depending on the rules you set - and will have immediate access to the chat.

University professor Marco Ricci teaches Intro to Macroeconomics. The course is primarily taken by freshmen who have had limited background in economics coursework previously, and the class is large - typically in the range of 150 students. Marco has eight teaching assistants, each of whom are masters or doctoral students in the economics department.

Things to keep in mind

  • Cost: free and paid options, depending on desired features

  • Pros

    • Quick set-up

    • Clean user interface

  • Cons

    • Many great features of this application require purchasing a paid account (e.g. private student-teacher messaging). Luckily, the fee isn’t particularly steep ($15/year for a classroom or $299/year for a school), but it means that using this tool to its maximum potential will require payment.

    • Number of concurrent users allowed may prove limiting for very large lecture halls. Free accounts only support 30 users; paid accounts support between 50-80 users in the chat at a given time.

Marco is new to the university and was asked to teach this course as a rite of passage. He wouldn’t have elected to do so otherwise; he found his first batch of students uninterested and was disheartened by the blank faces that met him in lecture every time class met.

 

One of his doctoral students proposed introducing the Backchannel Chat, which this student had encountered in another class and found useful. Marco discovered his university had purchased a paid account. He sought out the credentials, navigated to the website, and in roughly one minute, had set up his own chat room. In lecture, he wrote the URL on the board and encouraged any students who wanted to join to do so. Marco requested that the TAs moderate the chat, but each time he asked for questions in lecture, he would also pause to look at the chat screen and verbally respond to questions posed there.

 

He was pleasantly surprised to see the room populated with a good amount of conversation and recognized that without the backchannel, he might never have heard these comments.

bottom of page