Lecture capture

Impact and student use of lecture recording

Lecture recording is becoming more established in Higher Education with 71% of institutions reporting using it in 2016 (UCISA, 2016) and many moving towards an opt out system.

At LSE an increasing number of courses are using lecture recording to support students. In 2016/17, 6445 lectures were recorded (a 12.7% rise in recordings from 2015/6) and with over 5000 recordings already completed this academic year we are on track to record an additional 25% more content for 2017/18.

Despite the expansion in the use of lecture recording there is still a concern amongst some academic staff that recording lectures will lead to a decrease in lecture attendance. These Academics should be relieved to hear about the results of a recent study at the University of Aberdeen by Emily Nordmann, Colin Calder, Paul Bishop, Amy Irwin and Darren Comber, published in January 2018 the team found “no evidence for a negative effect of recording use, or that attendance and recording use were related”. The study spanned four years of an Undergraduate programme in order to review the impact of attendance, lecture recording and student attainment. They concluded that lecture recordings were the most beneficial for first year undergraduates, particularly non native speakers. Weaker students gained from supplementary use of recordings but only the stronger students were able to use the recordings to overcome the impact of low attendance. These differences were not present in the second year onwards as “attendance and recording use were positively correlated with, but no longer predictive of, achievement”.

Students’ use of lecture capture
These findings have been reinforced by recent analysis of LSE lecture recording statistics and interviews and surveys with LSE students for five core first year undergraduate courses.

The study carried out by student research assistants for LTI found that:

the majority of students watch the whole lecture once and then repeat and re-watch at points of difficulty with the number of views for this purpose being significantly higher for quantitative subjects

Very few students used lecture recordings as a replacement for attendance, preferring to use it as a revision tool or where they had valid reasons to miss the lecture (such as a clash). This complementary role for lecture recording came through very strongly in the quantitative data;

“This [lecture recording] is still far more useful than merely having the lecture to depend on – I’ve literally watched certain parts of a lecture 6-8 times just to make sure I absolutely understand the content of the lecture. I usually watch each lecture at least twice as well”.

(Comment from EC102 student, EC102, is the most watched course in the School, with students watching each lecture on average seven times over the academic year. The most watched lecture was Week 11 of EC210 which was watched just over 5000 times.)

This use of lecture recordings to supplement lecture attendance is not restricted to the Social Sciences. In 2013 Peter Reed conducted a survey on lecture recording with 840 students at the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at the University of Liverpool. He found 92% of respondents wanted to be able to access recordings to clarify aspects they didn’t understand in class, and 87% would use them to prepare for summative assessment. Accessing recordings instead of going to lectures was of interest to only a small proportion of students (7%).

Additionaly an LTI literature review in 2013 illustrated that students in most studies preferred access to live lectures, with most preferring a blended format incorporating lecture recordings, live lectures, course materials and additional classes.

Lecture recording at LSE

At LSE the Echo360 lecture recording system is currently installed in 43 rooms. Teachers that are timetabled to lecture in a room with recording devices installed are able to schedule lecture recording on LSEForYou, if the teacher opts in the recordings are automatically recorded and can be made available to students on Moodle using the Echo360 Activity.

The recording displays the audio and video of the screen/visualiser in classrooms and the projector and presenter in larger lecture theatres. See the LTI website for a list of room with lecture capture devices.

Next steps for lecture recording at LSE

LTI are working with AV and IMT to improve the quality of lecture recordings and are currently working on creating various resources to help lecturers to use lecture recording facilities.

IMT AV recently upgraded the hardware in Clements House lecture rooms in order to improve audio and video quality. There are further development plans for lecture recording capable rooms starting with 32LIF which is due for an upgrade over the easter break. Longer term the new LSE buildings should increase the capacity for lecture recording.

LTI are also working with various teams around the school such as timetables and LFY to solve the inability to automatically schedule seminars that are taught in a lecture style. We are hopeful to have this resolved for the next Michaelmas term.

Alongside making constant improvements to the system we are also looking to innovate lecture recording and encourage lecturers to think about how they could use recordings in different ways inclusing using personal capture to produce online resources to support face to face activities. Part two of this post will look at how technology can be used to rethink your lectures and make them more engaging and interactive.

If you are interested in using lecture recording see our website for guides and FAQ’s and if you have any queries please email: IMT.Lecturerecording@lse.ac.uk

References

Bond, Steve and Grussendorf, Sonja (2013), Staff Attitudes to Lecture Capture. The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

Grummett, D and Appleby-Donald, E (2016, June 1) ‘Does lecture capture enhance learning?’

retrieved from University of Edinburgh http://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/?p=526

Karnad, Arun (2013) Student use of recorded lectures: a report reviewing recent research, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

Kuepper-Tetzel, C (2017, December 07) ‘Lecture attendance, lecture recordings and student performance; A complex, but noteworthy relationship’ [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2017/12/07-1

Nanfeldt, K (2017, September 7) ‘Lecture Recording: What does research say about its effect on attendance?’ [Blog post]. Retrieved from Teaching matters-blog, University of Edinburgh http://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/?p=1972

Nordmann, E., Calder, C., Bishop, P., Irwin, A., & Comber, D. (2017, November 10) ‘Turn up, tune in, don‘t drop out: The relationship between lecture attendance, use of lecture recordings, and achievement at different levels of study.’ Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/fd3yj

Rana, Y (2017) ‘All Edinburgh lectures to be recorded from September 2017’ (blog post) retrieved from https://thetab.com/uk/Edinburgh/2016/10/03/lectures-recorded-September-2017-26019

Reed, P ‘What do students want out of lecture capture?’ 2013, November 15) (blog post) retrieved from http://thereeddiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/what-do-students-want-out-of-lecture.html

Rios-Amaya, J.. Secker, J. and Morrison, C. (2016) Lecture recording in higher education: risky business or evolving open practice LSE / University of Kent.

Von Konsky, B.R., Ivins, J. and Gribble, S.J. (2009) Lecture attendance and web based lecture technologies: A comparison of student perceptions and usage patterns Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2009, 25(4), 581-595.

January 23rd, 2018|Lecture recording, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies, Uncategorized|1 Comment|

Neurodiversity and lecture capture – the student voice

Last November, Steve Bond and I released the findings of the Neurodiversity and Lecture Capture report, where we surveyed 124 LSE students at all levels to find out their experiences with lecture capture and lecture recordings. To get more insight into the issues raised in the survey, we decided to run focus groups in March with undergraduate and postgraduate students who identified themselves as neurodiverse. Four students participated; two postgraduate (Student A and Student B) and two undergraduate (Student C and Student D). Here’s what they had to say.

September 22nd, 2014|Images, Audio & Video, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Student Use of Recorded Lectures report

I’m really pleased to announce that CLT’s latest report on Student Use of Recorded Lectures is now available at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/50929/.

This report reviewed recent literature on the use of recorded lectures, and explores 4 issues on the subject:

How do students use recorded lectures?
When do students access recorded lectures?
What effect do recorded lectures have on student attainment?
What effect do recorded lectures have on student attendance?

The report concluded that students find lecture recordings to be a learning useful tool, and mainly use recorded lectures to make up for missed lectures and to prepare for assessments, which also explains student access patterns to recorded lectures. Having access to recorded lectures did not have any significant effect on student attainment for assessments, and although some students may choose to miss lectures due to the availability of recorded lectures, there seems to be little evidence that students actually believe that having access to recorded lectures is the main cause or incentive to miss lectures. In fact, the majority of students (55%) surveyed by Traphagan et al. (2009) strongly agreed that they preferred receiving lecture content in class, even when it is available through other means.

There is also scope for further research into how specific groups of students with high rates of access utilise recorded lectures, such as students with neurodiverse conditions and students from a non-English Speaking Background (NESB). Steve Bond and I have already got the ball rolling on that front, and are conducting a survey of students with neurodiverse conditions at the LSE, the results of which we hope to share online by the end of August, or early September.

References:

Traphagan, T., Kucsera, J. V & Kishi, K., 2009. Impact of class lecture webcasting on attendance and learning. Educational Technology Research & Development, 58(1), pp.19–37. Available at: http://www.springerlink.com/index/10.1007/s11423-009-9128-7 [Accessed March 11, 2013].

June 25th, 2013|Images, Audio & Video, Reports & Papers, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Neurodiversity and Lecture Recording survey

Steve Bond and I have been reviewing some of the research on how students use lecture recordings for their studies, and we noticed that several papers mention that lecture recordings could be helpful for neurodiverse students, particularly students with dyslexia, without actually measuring how. A bit more delving revealed that, although research has been done on dyslexic students’ views on Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), and studies have looked at note-taking by dyslexic students, little research exists about how dyslexic students actually use lecture recordings in their studies.

We got in touch with Sophie Newman, the Disability Officer with the LSE Student Union and Linda Kelland at the Disability and Well-being office for some more information. Their advice has been really helpful in highlighting some of the challenges neurodiverse students face at the School, such as lack of access to lecture recordings and lecture notes, and how students are using apps such as Notability to help make notes in lectures, which has really helped us get some insight into this topic.

So we thought we’d do a bit of research on this, and we need your help. We’d be most grateful if you could take our survey at http://tinyurl.com/p4eb5s9, but we’d also like your opinions and experiences on questions like:

What are the challenges you’ve faced making notes or recordings?
What are your experiences with lecture recordings on Moodle? Do you find them useful? And
What do you think would make life easier for your studies at the school (lecture recording wise, of course)?

There’s also a chance to enter a draw to win a £50 Amazon voucher, so if you’d like to help out, please comment below!

May 28th, 2013|Uncategorized|Comments Off|

Time to flip?

“Flipping” the lecture is an approach that has been gaining popularity in UK education recently. It means providing students with a video recording in lieu of an actual lecture, and then using the timetabled lecture period to do something more interactive with students.

One pioneer of this approach is Carl Gombrich, director of the Arts and Sciences programme at UCL. In his words, “it is a no-brainer to me that generally students get more than double the benefit by seeing your lecture on a video … and then have a full hour in which to discuss their thoughts on the video.” You can read more in Carl’s reflections on a year of flipped lectures.

CLT would love to hear from any member of lecturing staff who would like to try something similar at LSE. The Echo360 lecture recording system enables not only recording of live lectures, but also personal recording from the desktop, so your video lectures can be a more intimate affair. If this sounds interesting, please drop us a line at clt-support@lse.ac.uk.

January 11th, 2013|Announcements, Images, Audio & Video|Comments Off|

Publishing Echo recorded lectures in Moodle

Update: I wouldn’t recommend using this method now. The EchoCenter works just fine, and has the added benefit of displaying analytics to instructors.

WTH?

EchoSystem, the lecture recording service we are running at LSE, provides various methods for publishing links to recorded lectures in Moodle, our VLE (LMS).

The “Moodle Publisher” places the links in the course calendar, with each recording listed as a separate “event”. This is useful, but it is not immediately apparent to our students that they should look there for the links.

If configured to do so, EchoSystem will generate RSS feeds for each course’s “section” or “module”. This is also useful, because RSS feeds can be used in a number of contexts, including Moodle’s Remote RSS feeds block. But there’s a problem: unless you have given your presenters the ability to edit their recordings (we haven’t), or you have the time to edit them yourself (we don’t), all the recordings from a particular section end up with the same title.

November 26th, 2010|Images, Audio & Video, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Staff Survey – lecture capture

Every year we send out a survey to staff to gauge the effect of various technologies, such as Moodle and it’s many components, online readings and lecture capture on their teaching. This year 138 people completed the survey. I was particularly interested to see the feedback on the automatic lecture capture system and this proved to rouse the strongest comments. We wanted to get a general sense of who was using lecture capture and what they thought about it, but more specifically, we wanted to hear from lecturers who might use it in their teaching.

Breaking down the stats and looking at solely the responses from lecturers (59) it was interesting to see a very distinct divide between those who had used the system and those who had never used it. By looking at the stats in this way it was clear that the majority of lecturers who have doubts or fears about the technology have never used the system and those that value lecture capture and think it is a benefit to students are already using it. There were one or two instances where people had used the automatic system in the past and were put off by technical problems etc.

Whatever the case, it seems that lecture capture is polarising opinion and that a number of fears about the technology are adding to this. One of the biggest fears about lecture capture is that it will affect student attendance and although there’s no evidence to back this, there’s little evidence to quash it either! Perhaps we need to do some focus groups with lecturers who have been using the system for a few years to gauge the feeling about class attendance. However, if some courses find that attendance has gone down and others don’t, what then? And is lecture attendance really an issue if you’re giving students the choice? There is also a fear that lecture capture will replace live lectures altogether and that somehow lecture capture is taking the emphasis away from face to face contact via lectures, seminars and office hours. Lecture capture is designed to be a revision tool, a way to help students recap and further understand a lecture, fill out any missing notes from lectures and to help those for whom English is not their first language. These benefits are what students list when they say they like the system. Lecture capture can be recorded and released for a short period of time, such as revision period, and yet there are still fears about students skipping lectures, declining note taking skills and lethargy from students. So, how do we respond to all of these comments? We’re very much aware that a survey can only give a slice of staff opinion, especially as only 138 people responded. Would it help to have a wider debate about this issue?

August 5th, 2009|Announcements, Images, Audio & Video, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Symposium at York University: lecture capture, content production & Second Life

Jane and I participated in a one day in-house symposium at the University of York this week. The audience were made up of both academic and support staff interested in learning from other universities about lecture capture, audio and video content production and Second Life. We were asked to talk about audio and video content production and so showcased some of the video & audio that’s produced here. We focused on lecture capture momentarily as although it is the most prolific output of media at the LSE, with 909 lectures having been captured in just one term this year, two other universities: Birmingham and Newcastle had already given extensive presentations on this subject. Instead, we wanted to highlight the idea of audio and video as a part of teaching, not just as a means to capture the teaching that’s already going on. We played examples of interviews & discussions, role playing scenes, groupwork, screencasts, video and audio podcasts as well as highlighting some of the Wimba tools and audio feedback. We also talked about the issue of scaling up to meet increased interest in media, professionally produced video vs the DIY approach and touched on the copyright issues involved.

It was an interesting day with good discussions both formally and over coffee/lunch and it was really nice to meet people in similar roles. The most lively debate came from the lecture capture sessions. It seems that across the board, the majority of students really value lecture capture (no real surprises) and staff are cautious about the educational benefits and fears about attendance. There were certainly many parallels between the student and staff surveys at both Birmingham Medical School and Newcastle university and the LSE. Rob Jones’ findings from Birmingham were particularly interesting because they compared the relationship between usage stats and grades. The findings look promising where the mean rose from 51% to 55% and the failure rate dropped to 2/69. The quality of answers also improved with students indicating a greater breadth of knowledge and looking at a wider set of resources.

The Second Life talks in the afternoon reminded me that Second Life is good for simulation and specifically designed educational activities but that perhaps we should be looking at other virtual worlds for better communication, movement, role play etc. Sheila Webber from Sheffield and Steve Warburton from King’s College agreed that Second life is probably not sophisticated enough for a young gaming audience; the average age of SL users is apparently 33. Steve flagged up MetaPlace, OpenSim (open source) and Blue Mars as potential Virtual World’s to explore, so perhaps another pilot project is due. Read Jane’s Social Software, Libraries and E-learning blog for more information on the lecture capture and Second Life presentations.

July 10th, 2009|Conferences, Images, Audio & Video|Comments Off|

DIVERSE video and teaching conference 2009

Aberystwyth sunset This week I’m attending the 9th annual DIVERSE conference in Aberystwyth. DIVERSE stands for “Developing Innovative Visual Educational Resources for Students Everywhere” and the focus of the conference tends to be on video resources, although it is not entirely limited to that subject.

It has to be said, I was expecting to be subjected to a certain amount of wind and rain, so came prepared with umbrella and raincoat which of course haven’t been out of my bag as the weather has been fantastic (see photo).

Highlights so far include a talk by Mark Childs of Coventry on the subject of students developing a sense of virtual presence when using virtual worlds such as Second Life. Fundamentally, his message was that not a small amount of time needs to be invested in generating such a sense of presence. From his research he also found a correlation between those students that valued their Second Life activities as a learning experience and those that felt a sense of presence when using Second Life. Mark also came up with a couple of good words, my favourite being “cyberdisinhibition”. I don’t think I need to explain its meaning.

I also went to a session presented by Olaf Schulte who was talking about the Opencast project, which intends to develop a completely open source lecture capture system over the course of the next year. It certainly looks an interesting project and I’m keen to see what they come up with. He also mentioned a couple of other projects developing along similar lines that already exist, his own REPLAY project and also one called MediaMosa which I previously hadn’t heard of.

Today’s keynote speaker was Obadiah Greenberg from YouTube who talked a lot about his background setting up a lecture capture system at UC Berkeley and how they used as many distribution platforms as possible to widen the availability of Berkeley lectures. He certainly prompted me to think why aren’t any regular LSE lectures available through either iTunesU or YouTube.com/edu, which I guess was his intention. Finally, today’s most entertaining presentation was by Steve Hull from JISC Digital Media who gave a talk on the basics of producing good quality films using basic equipment, such as a Flip camera. Rather than try to describe the talk I can recommend watching when it becomes available. Which of course prompts me to mention that all of the sessions at this conference are being recorded by Echo 360, so if you aren’t at the conference you can just go to the conference schedule page and click on the link to each session and then find the Echo 360 link for the recording.

There are of course the now usual Twitter and Flickr feeds and I think this conference definitely has the highest ratio of iPhones per participant that I have been to so far. Maybe I’ve only noticed because I’ve just acquired one myself 🙂 but then given the subject of the conference there’s almost certainly a high concentration of Apple fans here I think.

It’s the conference dinner this evening, then a few sessions tomorrow morning and of course the 5 hour train journey back to London to enjoy.

June 25th, 2009|Conferences, Images, Audio & Video, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Echo360 "EchoSystem" reviewed

Screenshot of online lecture Here at LSE we’ve been using lecture capture systems for a few years now, starting with Anystream Apreso and moving on to EchoSystem by Echo 360 over the last academic year. I’ve been meaning to post a review of our experience of implementing these systems on this blog, never quite getting around to it. Eventually, the editor of the Association for Learning Technology newsletter asked Chris Fryer and myself to write a review, which you can find in full on the ALT newsletter website.