Voices speaking in hushed tones, the scratch of pencil on paper, the quiet clatter of laptop keys. In the larger lecture theaters this is the soundscape in which academic knowledge is passed on. For students now having to use a live stream, the absence of this kind of background noise may be one of the reasons why they feel less ‘present’ during a lecture, and subsequently find themselves less able to concentrate.

Prompted by this notion, a group of five students took the opportunity provided by their bachelor's course ‘Acoustic Awareness’ to look at whether artificial ‘lecture sounds’, played from a website where you can install noises like these yourself, might boost the feeling of being present at online lectures. “We ourselves were also noticing that it didn't take much to distract us during online colleges,” explains Veerle Bekx, one of the students. “What you often see, too, is people not switching on their camera; that doesn't help either. Oftentimes, when a lecturer asks something, there is hardly any reaction.”

Jokes

Eventually, Bekx and her fellow students managed to get eleven first-year Psychology & Technology students to complete a short questionnaire both before and after a lecture on ‘Social Psychology and Consumer Behavior’, which had been given against a background of selected sounds. “We saw that the background noise clearly added to the feeling of being present at the lecture; to the ‘social presence’, as it is called. It manages, in some small way, to give you the sense that someone is sitting next to you, and they too are listening.” The participating students also felt more motivated and were more appreciative of the lecturer's jokes, says Bekx.

It is a tiny study and not representative per se, as the third-year student of Psychology & Technology herself realizes. Nonetheless, she thinks that certain students can certainly benefit from having human background noises during online lectures. “Of course, you also have students who prefer to study and listen to lectures in absolute silence. But anyone who enjoys studying in MetaForum, with some hubbub in the background, may find this has something to offer them.”