Lecture or Tutorial Highlights

Prior to Semester:

1. Consider the most appropriate software for your lecture and students, taking into consideration:

   1. RMIT students are already signed up for Google Docs. They can edit, comment and reply to comments, images and valid urls can be inserted and become live. However Google Docs struggles with large author contributions

   2. Etherpad/ModPad is a conversational tool, with a chat and text window, in a single document with different coloured and multiple editing facilities

   3. TodaysMeet session is a live room which you name and provide to students before the lecture. It has a clean and simple interface; students don’t need any special skills or accounts to participate and each message is limited to 140 characters, like Twitter

2. Select the most appropriate software (Google docs; ModPad/Etherpad; TodaysMeet) for your students

3. Link the software to Blackboard or the course site

4. Develop netiquettes and post them onto your course site. The netiquettes could include:

   1. Comment on rather than edit another student’s notes

   2. Be polite and sensitive when making comments

   3. Don’t add unnecessary distractions to the notes

   4. Keep writing brief and to the point

5. Add a few generic suggestions for students on how to make effective notes or comment such as:

   1. Try to identify key concepts

   2. Don’t try to write verbatim

   3. Look for keywords (“the three main ideas are”, “what Kaufman was trying to say was”)

   4. Use abbreviations that are clear to all (make a list if necessary)

   5. Leave spaces between sentences for later additions

Introducing Backchannel into your lecture or tutorial

6. At the end of one of your lectures or tutorials, notify students that Backchannel will be used in the next session

7. Ask students to do the readings for the next session to have some understanding about the topic

8. Ask students to pre-populate the document with no more than 5 key points, questions or concepts they want explained in more detail

9. Prior to lecture, scan the document to tailor your session to your students’ concerns

Backchannel lecture or tutorial

10. Start session with reference to the document and answer students’ concerns

11. Ask students to open the document you have prepared for the session

12. Ask students to make notes or comments  about the lecture, refer to the generic suggestions on the course site

13. Adjust your lecture and tutorial delivery to enable note-taking pauses and reflection

At the end of the session

14. Pick out the highlights, such a prevalent questions or comments and answer them via your course announcements

15. Or import the highlights into a word cloud generator (refer to REsources/Technology) or other data analysis tool, to generate the highlights

16. Share highlights with your students

17. Archive the backchannel into Google Drive for student perusal

18. Share the link to that document through the Blackboard course site

19. Encourage students to copy and paste the final document and make their own comments for clarifications