Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Koos Winnips et al.
Students liked to respond and answer questions during the lecture, and found the discussed
questions during and after the lecture (via Blackboard) useful. These effects on motivation can be
explained in three ways:
Contact between lecturer and students is improved. Students indicate that the lecturer can better
adapt to what they know. Students did not mention that they got a better view of what is expected of
them. There was no mention that students got better personal contact with the lecturer, or that they
would like this. Except for one student’s question (about the lecturers conference visit) the contact
between lecturer and student was purely focused on course content.
Students indicate they are taken seriously, as the lecturer makes an effort to hear their opinions
and comments. The lecturer indicated that, because of opening up the lecture for reactions,
students were more likely to visit him for face-to-face questions.
Confidence of students can increase. Being provided with direct feedback on their answers can
give students confidence that they will be able to master the course content.
As a side effect, lecturers indicated their own motivation for lecturing increased, as they were now
able to “get something back” from the audience. Uninterrupted lecturing can be unpleasant for a
lecturer: “Do they understand?”, “Was this covered in another course?”, “Is the lecture getting
boring?”. Getting audience reactions thus improves the lecturers’ motivation.
What students did not appreciate was that they themselves had to pay for the SMS messages. When
using mobile Internet to respond, this was not a problem. Most of the lecture rooms at the University
of Groningen have wifi connection.
What forms of providing open comments during lectures can be used?
From students open comments in the questionnaire, a general issue was that students would have
liked more moments for interaction in the lecture. The lectures now had only one fixed block of
reactions (after the coffee break). By specifically building in more moments for interaction, students
indicated they would be less distracted. For future use of the reactionlecture, it would be a good idea
to build in these specific blocks of interaction, so students do not get distracted by sending in their
comments, but use it as a way to help the lecturer adapt to the entry knowledge of the students.
Some students indicated that they wanted to ask a question, but lost the phone number. Showing the
phone number to send questions to, on every slide of the lecturers presentation might have helped to
get more reactions.
It took more time than expected for students to think up and send in comments. The time for reacting
needs to be taken into account. Reacting via SMS messages takes more time then reacting via
Personal Response Systems (sometimes called Clickers). Using the mobile Internet, reacting would
take about the same time as reacting via Clickers. Reactions and discussions take time, which needs
to be planned into the lecture. This stresses the point that the reactions and discussions need to focus
on the main topics of the lecture. In this way, instead of wasting valuable lecture time, the time for
reactions is used to help students focus on what is important, and will help students to process this
information.
During conferences nowadays, a backchannel seems to be a “must-have”. The audience sends in
reactions on presentations via Twitter, resulting in further reactions, lively discussions, and making
contact between the participants (getting “followers”). For this study, this model of interaction could
not be copied to the lecture room, as the audience and setting are different. This group of second
year Bachelor’s students is more reticent in asking questions and making comments. They prefer to
have a structure planned, with dedicated response time. Furthermore, students prefer to have direct
contact with their lecturer based on course content, not with their peers (in or out of the lecture room).
Planning in more moments of interaction can make the reactionlecture more effective, with more
student reactions and dedicated key topics for discussion.
With students using tools such as Twitter and Facebook, and phones with mobile Internet being used
more and more in lecture halls, a more free form of the reactionlecture can work. But for now, it
seems this “Facebook generation” does not behave like the earlier mentioned conference audience.
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