Welcome to Packback!
Our mission as a company is to connect effortless technology with motivating pedagogy to create learning experiences that fuel students' curiosity and enable instructors to spend more time teaching and less time administrating.
This guide contains the information about how to create and set up a new community on Packback, and how to integrate Packback into your course design as an instructor.
What is Packback?
Packback enables Inquiry-Based Online Discussion at scale. Using AI, our platform acts as a Digital TA to coach students to ask their own open-ended questions, auto-moderate the discussion, and help instructors amplify the impact of their feedback.
How does Packback support instructors?
Packback's platform offers a comprehensive toolset for building a motivating and engaging learning environment through discussion.
Packback's AI acts as your "Digital TA", helping to identify great posts for you to highlight in your class, auto-moderating the community on Packback's Community Guidelines, and auto-scoring content based on your weekly participation requirements.
Outside of the Packback AI, instructors on Packback are equipped with a number of tools that make managing online discussions easy and scalable, including tools to help browse, gather insights from, and give feedback on discussions.
How does Packback support students?
Packback has been designed to create a discussion environment that supports intrinsic motivation and curiosity, the benefits of which extend beyond the discussion into overall class engagement and performance. Packback's product design references existing academic research on how to build effective online communities and encourage critical thought, as well as research in the realm of positive psychology to help build a motivating experience.
This has led to a platform that delivers better quantitative discussion metrics (more source citations, longer posts, more consistent posting) and improved course outcome metrics.