Use of video in teaching and learning
Languages Show-and-Tell
Today I attended a Language Centre show-and-tell organised by Hervé Didiot-Cook and attended by teachers from the LSE as well as our good friends from Columbia University Language Resource Center – Bill & Stéphane.
Challenges/Risks of Second Life
Tamy Zupan, the LSE’s SL evangelist (!) talked us thru’ some of the challenges we are going to face as we look at introducing Second Life. These include an interface with a steep learning curve, negative attitudes from staff and students, a lack of narrative (as it’s a virtual world not a game), unclear moral & ethical boundaries and some cultural challenges and of course the pedagogy: how to take advantage of the potential that it offers for for language teaching and how to assess this. CLT will be supporting the Spanish teachers in a pilot which, for now, will very much be an opt-in for students who are keen to explore the use of SL in their Spanish studies.
Lecture capture evaluation: report of the focus group
Methodology and design
A focus group was conducted in place of the survey that has previously been used to evaluate video lectures. A series of open ended questions were devised in order to gather opinions about student experiences of lecture capture including both video and audio lectures. This report includes student feedback, problems and issues and the value of recorded lectures as a learning aid.
Three students attended the focus group, so generalising about their experiences is difficult but their experience was varied and offered valuable insight. The first student recorded lectures himself with an audio recorder with permission from his lecturers. He said that the lectures were so inspirational that he wanted a recording to be able to listen to them again and again. A second student had access to recorded lecture material centrally provided by the Media and Communications department. The third student had access to both audio recordings (podcasts) and video lectures and could comment on the value of both types of recordings.
Value of Lecture capture
All three students commented on the value of recording lecture material. In particular they said it was extremely useful for revision. One student found recorded lectures very useful for a statistics course, commenting that they were especially useful for postgraduates who have to work and study at the same time. All students mentioned that recorded material was useful if you couldn’t attend a lecture or you want a recap, saying it’s “like having your lecturer with you any time you want”.
The students commented that were more likely to dip into certain parts of the lecture rather than watch the whole lecture again. This approach was particularly useful for revision but also really helpful for grasping a point they might initially not have understood. Students talked about how lectures could be extremely content rich or ‘dense’ and that the ability to go back and review the material really helped their learning.
Audio verses video
The student who had access to podcasts and video lectures commented that video lectures are much easier to follow than audio lectures. He said:
“Podcasts have the effect of nearly dosing off, you try to concentrate but all you see is the PowerPoint slides…because you lose the personal touch, you don’t see the face, you don’t see someone moving, interacting”.
Being able to see more than just PowerPoint slides was particularly valuable in economics courses for example, where the recordings are of limited value if you can’t see the graphs or additional notes the lecturer makes. However, one student felt that audio would be sufficient in his subject, which was not so reliant on visual material. Overall, in terms of retaining interest, the video lectures where the lecturer and the PowerPoint could be seen were preferred.
Access and Quality Issues
Students reported no real problems accessing video lectures both on and off campus. That said, later on in the focus group the students stated that the recorded lectures should be easier to find. They thought it would be helpful to have a podcast web page, perhaps under departmental headings or an archive of recordings. Another student commented that it was difficult to find the statistics lectures on the Methodology Institute website. In terms of navigation, the students did not report any problems with the format of the videos. One student felt it might be nice to divide the video into chapters, although he appreciated this would involve considerable post-production work.
In terms of quality, it was felt that the audio could be improved. The audio quality of public lectures in large theatres was noticeably better than some of the recordings from classrooms.
Value as a learning experience
One student commented that it was reassuring to know that certain lectures in statistics were being recorded, so they could go back and revisit the material. Another student found many of his lecturers inspirational and knowing there was a recording of the event allowed him to enjoy the lecture without having to take detailed notes. Again it was commented that being able to review the material for a second or even third time was valuable to ensure they grasped everything that was being said. The students felt this was especially good for students for whom English was not their first language.
The challenge of taking notes and listening to a lecture properly was mentioned by students, who felt it was “Humanly impossible to make notes in full” without listening again. This student felt you might miss around 35% of what was said during a lecture. They found it both reassuring to know the video lectures were available and extremely helpful for their revision. Students also commented that being able to listen to the lecture again often saved the students from needing to consult their lecturer with questions at a later date.
Lecture capture and attendance
The students were asked specifically about whether lecture capture affected attendance and certainly some of the students had friends who didn’t attend some lectures because they knew it would be available as a video lecture. Students tended to skip those subjects that were perceived as less interesting or more generic if they knew it was being recorded. However, in general the students we questioned talked about enjoying attending lectures and didn’t think the recordings had affected attendance overall. They reported that even if they didn’t attend a lecture they still needed to dedicate the time to listen to or watch the recording, so it was really easier for them to attend. As one student said:
“You need to go to the lecture to make it real, solidarity with your friends…you want to see the people, ask questions and see your friends asking questions.”
Future Developments
The students were keen to see all lectures at LSE recorded if possible and they also thought it would be useful to have access to recorded lectures after the course finished.
Students were asked specifically about whether they might be interested in listening or watching the lectures via mobile technology, such as on their mobile phone. Two of the group felt this might be useful, although they felt they were more likely to listen to public lectures and inspirational lectures on the bus, rather than material you needed to concentrate on in detail.
JS / SL
May 2008
George Soros live webcast
George Soros is speaking tomorrow (May 21st) as part of the regular LSE events programme but this is the first time that LSE has streamed such an event live. I mention it here because we’ve been able to do this on the back of our investment in Apreso (now known as Echo 360) and the automated recording of teaching lectures. Using Osprey SimulStream we’ve been simultaneously capturing and streaming some of our public lectures to extra LSE lecture rooms as an overflow facility. If you’d like to watch the web cast live there will be a link from the LSE events page tomorrow from 5 p.m. (BST) and The Washington Note are also hosting the webcast. Mr Soros is funding the back end of the streaming infrastructure. FinChannel.com have posted an article if you would like more detail.
George Soros photo used under a Creative Commons licence courtesy of WorldEconomicForum at Flickr.com
Web conferencing a-go-go
Today has ended up being a day for looking at web conferencing software! This morning I went with Matt to London Knowledge Lab to look at Elluminate. We already have a licence for Wimba Live Classroom and unfortunately so far it hasn’t proved to be a reliable enough platform to recommend for use by LSE staff. Hence we are currently investigating various options in anticipation of interest from various LSE collaborative projects with other international institutions. This isn’t however an invitation for lots of phone calls from salespeople! We were fairly impressed with the functionality provided by Elluminate as well as hearing good things about its reliability. One interesting feature is that it buffers audio so that should there be any net congestion it will play catch-up with the audio by playing it at a faster than normal rate. I was slightly disappointed to find that it uses Java technology, including a rather (un)impressive 20 MB download before you can even get started. I guess this isn’t an issue so much when most people now have broadband access but it does provide a significant delay before you can get going. The big java applet does however mean that the interface is fully featured and not dependent on your web browser. It seems to do everything most people would need from a web conferencing system and most importantly it seems to make it fairly easy and it apparently just works. The only thing lacking in the current version seems to be a sensible way of managing video from more than one participant. Only one video feed is viewable at any time and the video doesn’t follow the audio automatically as it does with Live Classroom. There is also no way for the session moderator to switch the video feed from one participant to the other. We are hopefully going to try this out for ourselves sometime over the summer.
Coincidently our centre director forwarded me an invitation to a demonstration of dim dim being run by Jim Judges at the JISC Regional Support Centre for the West Midlands, so definitely not a sales pitch – just a straight demo/experimental web meeting. I’d already come across dim dim a couple of weeks ago and have been playing around with it so kind of already knew my way around; but I hadn’t tried using it in a live web meeting situation – which of course is the only way to test these things. I’ve been very impressed with the look and feel of the software and it uses a Flash streaming server for the audio and video rather than Java, which I’m happier with, but I guess not everyone would be. My experience at the meeting was pretty good, I could see and hear the main presenter perfectly and apparently everyone could see and hear me pretty well too. There were problems however with some of the participants having problems with their microphones – nobody could hear them or they were very quiet. It’s hard to know whether this was a fault with dim dim or not. However, there was one poor soul who didn’t seem to be able to see or hear anyone very easily and could only really contribute through text chat. There also seemed to be a few user interface problems – there were the volume slider bars for each speaking participant but for me they seemed to have no effect on the speakers’ sound level. I’m using Firefox so that shouldn’t really be a problem.
Interestingly, both of these systems integrate with Moodle – they appear as new activities and integrate user accounts, but I’ve not seen either of these integrations in action.Unfortunately it appears that the dim dim integration is limited to the open source “don’t use this in a production environment” version of the product, which is limited to 20 concurrent users. There isn’t much documentation on the dim dim website so it’s kind of hard to know whether this is true or not, maybe someone will read this and correct me! I shall update here if I hear otherwise. Anyway, I think I’ve gone on long enough – if you`re at the LSE and you`re interested in using this kind of technology please get in touch and we`ll see what we can do.
‘conference hall’ photo courtesy of shinemy from Flickr.com (licensed under Creative Commons)
Wimba Connect 2008
Wimba Connect 2008 was the inaugural conference for Wimba, a software company that provides a variety of educational software, some of which is used at the LSE. The big announcement at the conference was a new version of “Pronto” a tool we don’t use. It is an instant messaging (IM) system and Wimba are calling it the “first academic centric IM platform”! They argue it is different to IM systems such as MSN & Yahoo as you pre-load it with students (and staff). Students then see a list of contacts for each course they take as well as having the ability to create their own ad hoc groups. A basic version of Pronto has been around for a while and it will continue to be available offering text and audio communication between groups of students. “New” pronto, due for release in June, offers the following additions:
- Video
- Queued chat – allowing staff to run office hours with a queue of students in a waiting area. (Potentially of use for help desks etc too and Wimba are pushing it as an institutional system)
- Application sharing – users communicating via Pronto will be able to share documents, for example a word document
- Institutional announcements
Inaugural Echo 360 users conference, Coventry
Yesterday I attended the first-ever Echo 360 (formerly Apreso) conference which saw 40 or so people gather at Coventry University to look at how they are implementing lecture/event recording systems at their institutions. The day started with a number of presentations and rather than take you through every point I shall highlight some of the more interesting ideas raised during these presentations.
First off was the University of Birmingham who talked about their experience. A couple of things I mentioned that might be useful at LSE was as well as recording an event with Echo 360 it is possible to simultaneously stream this live at a fairly minimal cost. This uses a feature of the standard Echo 360 Osprey capture cards that we previously didn’t know about, called “Simulstream”.
They also showed a rather nifty remote control camera which may be of use at LSE where the lecturer would like to zoom the image rather than use the standard wide-angle shot. This could possibly be integrated into future versions of the LSE standard classroom lectern/media controls available to the teacher.
Newcastle University talked a little bit about evaluation and how they are going to assess the student experience of recorded lectures and pedagogical impacts for lecturers. Newcastle are unusual in the UK in that they are using Lectopia which merged with Apreso to form Echo 360 and they talked a little bit about their implementation. One useful feature of Lectopia they mentioned was that a ‘scheduled’ recording can be started using an audio trigger rather than starting at a set time. This means that there is less likelihood of five minutes of dead time being recorded before the actual lecture starts. this is hopefully something that will make it into a future version of the Echo 360 system. They also talked about the possibility of integrating the lecture recording schedule with their lectures timetable system. From the questions and discussion arising it also looks like the next version of Echo 360 will allow us to connect lectern controls to the lecture recording system which will allow easy operation by teachers if they want to stop or pause their recording.
Jocasta Williams from Echo 360 talked a lot about evaluation, so I think we will have to get back to her regarding our evaluation later this academic year. She also provided a link to some useful evaluation resources (including further research projects on lecture recording).
We were of course shown the next version (2.0) of the Apreso/Echo 360 event recording system and it looks as if they have certainly been listening to our feedback as most of the features/improvements that we’ve previously requested seem to have made it into the new product. We are just about to start beta testing the next version at LSE so we should the able to get our teeth into this pretty soon.
Learning On Screen conference
Marie and I attended the Learning on Screen: Copyright exceptions post Gowers / Taking Down Television II conference held this year as a one day event at the British Library. It was organised by the BUFVC. The copyright focus meant I attended rather than other colleagues in CLT and it also had useful updates on ERA+ Licence which Marie and I hoped would be useful for the MIDESS Project. The conference was opened by Lynne Brindley from the BL, and the morning focused on looking at the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property carried out last year by the Treasury. Various speakers reported on Gowers and what it meant to them including Toby Bainton from SCONUL, Andrew Yeates from ERA, Laurence Bebbington and Richard McCracken. The overall consensus was that Gowers very much was about striking a balance, but that fair dealing really doesn’t go far enough in allowing those in education to use copyrighted works in the way they would like to. There was also a sense that we could see many rights in copyright law being overriden by contract law. The OU in particularly felt that copyright laws tend to focsu too much on different media and the location of a person, rather than what their primary purpose was. So why shoudl distance learning or e-learning be any different to learning in a classroom? However, Gowers has certainly raised the profile of IPR so that can be no bad thing.
LSE video lecture service highly commended in national competition
Just a quick note to say that the LSE video lectures service provided by the Centre for Learning Technology and IT Services, managed to make the top three in the UCISA Award for Excellence competition with a highly commended award. As previously mentioned on this blog, the back end to the service is provided by Apreso. We’ve so far found the system extremely useful and have had plenty of very positive feedback from both students and staff, including some very welcome recognition from the LSE Students Union.
Embedding YouTube in the Blog
The other day I made a post with a link to a YouTube video. I tried to embed it using the code that YouTube supplies but this resulted in the blog looking like someone had taken a sledge hammer to it… and no video.
Today Charlie Beckett was asking how to do this for his POLIS blog so I’ve been looking into it. If you look at my earlier post you’ll see that it is now working but it’s a bit fiddly. I followed instructions posted by Matthias Zeller Memento which involves turning off the visual rich editor while you make the post. I’ve found that you only need to worry about your personal settings so a revision of the instructions would be:
- Login to WordPress admin
- Go to Users
- Uncheck ‘Use the visual rich editor when writing’
- Go to Write >> Write Post
- Type your post
- Paste the ‘embed’ code for your YouTube video in the write box (copied from YouTube)
- Publish
And then repeat 2&3 to turn the visual editor back on!
Digital Media for Teaching workshop
CLT recently ran a workshop for the LSE Teaching and Learning Centre workshops programme called “Digital Media for Teaching”. You can find all of the links referred to at del.icio.us as well as PDF and Flash versions of the PowerPoint presentation on our course resources page. This workshop runs again on May 2nd. We also regularly run an “Images, Multimedia and copyright” designer workshop so look out for this on our workshops page – and we’ll advertise on our mailing list. You’ll find the handouts and links for this on our course resources page if you can’t wait. We also jointly run a ‘presentation skills’ (PDF link) workshop with the LSE staff development unit.
