Enhancing interactivity in face-to-face lecture by using "board mediated communication"

This study is concerned about how teachers can enhance interactivity during face-to-face lectures. Toward this objective, the authors have developed a teaching tool which allows learners to send feedback during a lecture and displays the feedback, in real-time, on a projected screen (herein referred to as a "blackboard") (Sato et al. 2002). In this paper, the "Board Mediated Communication" (BMC) method is proposed as a critical feature of the tool to promote interactions both of a teacher-to-learner and learner-to-learner nature via the blackboard. Experiments were conducted to provide learners and teachers with a means to interact with each other and later evaluated. Results reveal that a teacher's questions ("scaffolding") of learners to promote feedback was an important factor in enhancing interactivity and improving BMC of typical quiet learners, by using the tool.