Abstract. In many lectures students use different mobile devices, like notebooks or smartphones. But the lecturers often do not know to what extent students use these devices for lecture-related self-regulated learning strategies, like writing notes or browsing for additional information. Unfortunately mobile devices also bear a potential for distraction. This article shows the results of observational study in five standard lectures in different disciplines and compares it to students' responses on computer use in lectures. The results indicate a substantial divergence between students' subjective stances on how they use mobile devices for learning in lectures and the actual observed, often lecture-unrelated behavior.

ABS TRACTThis article reports on the conception of a novel digital backchannel, project name Backstage, dedicated to large classes aiming at empowering not only the audience but also the speaker, at promoting the awareness of both audience and speaker, and at promoting an active participation of students in the lecture. The backchannel supports different forms of inter-student communication via short microblog messages, social evaluation and ranking of messages by the students themselves. Backstage allows for the aggregation of student's opinions aiming at supporting the community building of the audience and strengthening the students' awareness of and co-responsibility for the class work. The backchannel further supports immediate concise feedback to the lecturer of selected and aggregated students' opinions making it possible to strengthen the lecturer's awareness for students' difficulties. The backchannel's conception is motivated by learning sciences' findings and theories.This article is an extended version of (Bry et al., 2011) published at the IADIS International Conference e-Society, held in M arch 2011 in Avila, Spain.

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Abstract.Mobile devices, such as laptops, smartphones and tablets, are ubiquitous in lectures. Students report to use their mobile devices for lecturerelated activities (e.g. taking notes). Observational data shows, that students use mobile device mainly for lecture-unrelated activities, like Facebook or playing games. So currently, mobile devices seem to distract learners from the lecture and ultimately hinder student-teacher interaction. In this study, we investigated how students (n = 75) use their mobile devices (N = 80) in a traditional lecture setting when supported with the technological support system "Backstage" or not. Backstage entails functions for quizzing students (Audience-ResponseSystem) and a backchannel allowing students to interact with each other, commenting on slides, asking questions, and providing feedback to lecturers. The results show that this technology increases students' focus on lecture-related activities.

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