Leveraging trust relationships in digital backchannel communications

Discussions during lecture can clarify lecture points for audience members and help them deepen their understanding. However, the fast-pace of lectures and the large number of attendees can make these discussions impossible. Although digital backchannels have been used to address this problem, they present some drawbacks such as increasing distractions and not providing valuable information. We suggest incorporating audience members' levels of trust in the knowledge of other members into the design of backchannel communication systems. Based on this approach, we present methods and design considerations to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks of the previous backchannel communication systems.