Use of video in teaching and learning
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.
Presenting Prezi
I was reminded on Friday by the ever-innovative LSE Careers Service that I never shared my attempt at using Prezi, so here it is. I’d seen it used at a couple of events earlier in the year so when I was preparing for this year’s new academics induction I thought I’d give it a go for my Social Software in Teaching slot.
While it’s nice to sit in a presentation where PowerPoint doesn’t feature I’m not wholly convinced by Prezi. My main gripe is that I found it incredibly fiddly to use. It took me a long time to put this together, OK it was my first attempt, but I’m not sure it was worth it. The main advantage it seems, putting the occasionally sea-sickness inducing animation aside for now, is that it doesn’t need to be a linear presentation. It’s very easy to jump around and as most of my presentation could have been in any order I let the audience decide!
The LSE Careers Service Prezi I saw on Friday is below.
Screen Recording Made Simple
Update October 2010: ScreenToaster is back, ignore text below that says otherwise
I’ve just finished testing various free web-based screen recording tools. I’ve been looking at them for a new course at the LSE run by the LSE Careers Service & the Language Centre called English for Career Success. As part of the course students have to give a 5-minute presentation to the class. As a practice exercise before the live event they have to record themselves doing the presentation using a screen recording tool. They then receive feedback on it from the tutors before delivering the real thing.
Here is an example of a screen recording I just made using Screenr and below it you will find notes on it and my other two best finds ScreenToaster (no longer available) & Screenjelly. I recommend watching in full-screen mode.
All 3 tools are web-based, free & require an account. They publish with a unique URLs & can also be embedded elsewhere as I have done above. The quality of the output is good for all three and they can all be viewed full-screen. However there are some important differences between them which may affect which you choose.
eLearning 2020
On our last away day, the very (!) talented Athina, Jane & Steve came up with a novel way to present their take on the future of elearning: they created a 5 minute sci-fi video.The brief was to come up with a technology which might become the technology that will revolutionise… education, our lives, our society. They chose to explode the premise (& temporality) by offering a historical glance backwards, from a very distant future (in which, intriguingly, Lt. Uhura, and Mr. Spock have teamed up with Princess Leia) addressing the 2020 past. 
What I liked best was the underlying suggestion that in the distant future in which Stars Trek and Wars conjoin, the concept of learning has given way to (mere) data accumulation and information exchange. Spock, unable to escape his Vulcan psychological make-up, finds it illogical that humans might learn for the sheer enjoyment of understanding, applying and analysing concepts. To us humans (at least of today), information is that about which we will at a final stage be able to make judgments; we learn (by rote) “information”in order to apply our critical thinking in an informed way, ultimately to make sense of the world and us in it. Information has no value for its own sake, and learning is more than merely the acquisition of knowledge. Poor Spock overvalues rationality (or rather: logic) at the cost of creativity. Who’d be a Vulcan, eh…* Watch the video, it’s nicely provocative and entertaining.
*yes, I know he’s half-human.
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?
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.
DIVERSE video and teaching conference 2009
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.
Echo360 "EchoSystem" reviewed
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.
Kris Roger.
Launching JISC Digital Media at BAFTA
Yesterday afternoon I went off to the salubrious surroundings of Piccadilly to BAFTA headquarters to attend a launch event for the newly rebranded ‘JISC Digital Media‘ service. The new service previously existed under the name TASI, which we were told, in no uncertain terms, we are no longer allowed to mention. I came across TASI many years ago as a very useful support website for using digital images in teaching. Not only providing the technical know-how, but also some very good pedagogical reasoning for using images.
Video and sound too!
As part of their relaunch and new funding, the new JISC Digital Media service also supports use of video and audio material in addition to still images. To quote the launch booklet “JISC Digital Media exists to help the UK’s FE and HE communities embrace and maximise the use of digital media”. They’ve redesigned their website, with a bright new look, to make it far easier to find useful support guides and related materials, such as upcoming training workshops.
Digital media helpdesk
One thing that had passed me by previously was that they also run a national helpdesk. They can provide technical and copyright advice for institutions looking to set up support for digital media use within their teaching and learning. They can also provide help for more complex requests such as setting up a digitisation programme within an institution – possibly leading to consultancy.
Upcoming training courses run by JISC Digital Media include “Copyright and Digital Images”, “Colour Management”, “Building a Departmental Image Collection”, and “Essential Photoshop Skills” and many others.
If you are an LSE member of staff then please contact us at CLT if you have any questions about the JISC Digital Media service or about digital media in general.
Kris.
ITN/Reuters newsfilm archive now available to LSE teachers
Great news, after a Herculean effort digitising a ridiculous number of hours of news footage (3000 to be precise) the newsfilm online project has made the full ITN/Reuters archive live and available to all LSE teachers. You’ll find all the usual famous news clips from ITN and Reuters plus some very obscure clips dating all the way back to the 1st of January 1910 (footage of German military action if you’re interested). If you are on the LSE campus simply login using the direct access button. If you’re off campus you need to login via the UK Federation button.
Please contact us at CLT if you would like to make use of any of these clips in your teaching. We can provide advice on how best to present video in your Moodle course or how to include them in your PowerPoint slides for class teaching. You can e-mail us at clt-support@lse.ac.uk or phone extension 7833.
