Namn: Sepehr Amoor Pour

Alexandros Sombo

Titel: A user study of Twitter as a backchannel

Abstract

You raise your hand if you have a question. That is something everybody learns in school. Still there are not many hands up in the air during a lecture at the Royal Institute of Technology.

In this thesis, we ask ourselves if Twitter can be used as a backchannel during a lecture. How will the students react to a new way in asking questions and what are teachers’ opinions about social medias merged with the lecture. The purpose with the study is to explore if Twitter is a useful tool as a backchannel in the purpose of education.

A user test has been performed by us, where we have functioned as moderators and observed the survey.

We have obtained results which show that students and teachers are not quite familiar with Twitter which affects the usefulness of a backchannel. However, our results show that there is an interest among both students and teachers in the use of a backchannel during lectures. Still, backchannel as a form of education needs further development and needs further studies.