Creating an interactive tool for student communication: lessons learnt

Following significant success in the use of so-called “backchannel” tools in building student engagement within the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen’s University Belfast a situation arose in 2018 where our choice of provider closed down. We attempted to use other avjavascript:void(0);ailable off-the-shelf tools but for various reasons these were not widely adopted. At the end of 2018 we decided to implement our own student-facing communication, question and, chat tool for students and lecturing staff to use. Called QChan the system went live, while still under development, to classes aslarge as 400 in size in January 2019. Developing a system to encourage use, be easily accessible and yet secure and robust enough to withstand experimenting computer science students was something of a challenge. In 2020, QChan is widely used in our school and has been a driver to better student engagement. We continue to develop QChan and also analyse it and the other platforms’ content to better understand how to consistently engage with students