Twitter, Backchannels and Graduate Teaching

I will be teaching Public Health Law this coming academic term. I have suggested and have received UCHC's preliminary blessing to split the course into two semesters. The first is our core course on public health law and will provide the necessary foundational instruction for students and is a requirement for graduation. The second, probably titled "Advanced Seminar in Public Health Law" will delve into more complex topic areas including: cyberlaw, administrative law, preemption in detail, complex tort actions, PPACA, food law and obesity, environmental law, intellectual property and public health law research. These courses are still under development and will be cross-listed as law courses at UCONN law school. (The UCONN Law course descriptions and numbers are already up). More on these classes later.

As I complete the syllabus, I have been considering the use of social media. I tend to provide class materials on this site for my own reference. Because I teach students from several different schools—medical, public health, law—keeping the class organized in one spot on the cloud is difficult. The public health and medical students use Blackboard, the law students TWEN. For the first time this year, I am considering using Twitter as a class backchannel. Essentially, students can use Twitter to post comments and questions using a course hashtag.

The question becomes one of monitoring. Do other professors who use this monitor the channel during class? I use a modified Socratic method in teaching which can be difficult for the public health students initially. I am trying to set up systems to help them get their questions answered and to build a relationship among the students in class while improving their access to me. I wold also like there be a way to crowd-source their learning. If a public health student is reading a case that mentions iintermediate scrutiny, perhaps using Twitter he can get an answer from a law student colleague faster than from me. If a law student doesn't understand differences between incidence and prevalence, perhaps she can use Twitter for a quick answer from fellow students. Teaching this class in the past, I realized from post-class evaluations and analysis that students who built relationships across law and public health did much better than their peers that did not.

Do other professors have experience with this?