"Watching the watchers: how do students regard lecture capture?"

When: Thursday 4th July, 2.30 p.m.

Where: Robert Hooke Seminar Room

Speaker: Dr Ross Galloway

Hosted by: Sally Jordan

Abstract

In common with the increasing trend in universities worldwide, the University of Edinburgh has recently rolled out a large scale, institutional-level lecture capture system. This system has some specific capabilities tailored towards physical science teaching, including effective high-resolution capture of blackboards. We have conducted quantitative and qualitative investigations into how physics and mathematics students access the recordings, and also how they conceptualise their engagement with the system. We find no evidence of 'box set binge watching', and almost half of the students never accessed the recordings at all. We find that students hold reasonably sophisticated conceptions of the value of lecture recordings, broadly dividing into two main themes: supporting learning in live lectures; and personalisation of learning. Crucially, the students do not regard the lecture recordings in isolation, but rather see them as just one element of a much richer digital resource landscape: lecture recordings are seen as simply one option in a variety of available media, and students tailor their choices to their immediate requirements. In this seminar I will discuss our findings and suggest some implications for practice. I welcome discussion of how these observations relate to the wider context, including related findings from the Open University's distance-teaching environment.