Using lecture capture tools for uses *other than* recording lectures (1): Taxonomy of applications

Back in 2018 my colleague Matt Mobbs from the Leicester Learning Institute and I undertook a project to identify innovative uses of our institutional lecture capture (LC) system, in our case Panopto.

An outline of the variety of Pedagogies Involving Capture Technology at the University of Leicester (in 2018). The uses are discussed more fully in the text.

Universities around the world have invested huge amounts in both the software and associated hardware to facilitate the recording of lectures, which can subsequently be made available for student to watch asynchronously. A whole conversation already exists around best practice in use of the LC systems for this primary function.  In this project, however, we were more interested in innovative uses of the technology over and above the standard recording of large venue, and largely didactic, teaching; we wanted to know about Pedagogy Involving Capture Technology (PICT) beyond the classroom. With the help of our research assistant Gemma Mitchell (now University of York), we carried out a series of interviews with staff at the University of Leicester to find existing examples of good practice, with a view to producing a guide for the benefit of the wider community.

Does attendance at lectures matter? An accidental case study

There is a lot of discussion in the University sector at the moment about student engagement and attendance at lectures. I know that several institutions (including my own) have ongoing pedagogic projects trying to ascertain why there has been a decline in the number of people turning up for face-to-face teaching sessions.

I was faced in March with the dispiriting spectacle of turning up to give one of my second year lectures and finding the room considerably under-populated. The attendance monitoring system suggests that there were 66 out of 185 students present, so that would be about 36%, so a smidge over a third (and this is before we get into the rising phenomenon of “swipe-n-go” students who log their attendance… then don’t!). Yes it was the last lecture in the entire module, yes there were probably looming deadlines in other modules, but part of my frustration at the level of absenteeism was borne out of the fact that I knew that my 15 mark Short Answer Question for the summer exam was based on the content of this session. I was therefore intrigued to see how the students would get on – would there be reams of blank pages (the outcome that leaves academics with mixed feelings – disappointment at missed learning, offset by a guilty acknowledgement that their marking burden is reduced)?

Where’s the flippin’ flipping?

There’s a lot of discussion at the moment around the notion of “flipped teaching” or the “flipped classroom”. The common thread is the requirement (or opportunity) for students to do some kind of course-related work on their own, away from the classroom setting.

However, there’s a problem. Some people may think I’m being picky, but I believe that sloppy usage of the phrase “flipped teaching” is significantly muddying the waters. Specifically, I worry that the notions of flipped teaching and “lecture capture” are being conflated, to the detriment of careful examination of both.

In recent days I’ve had cause to read two different articles purporting to be about flipped teaching. In both cases, the work described a comparison of attendance at a live lecture versus watching a recording of the lecture. These are investigations of the potential impact of lecture capture, but they are NOT flipped teaching. Flipping the classroom requires that there is still some face-to-face classroom task. Advocates for this approach, of which I am one, would argue that the point of moving some of the activities out of the face-to-face session is to require (or at least encourage) students to have engaged in some preparatory work that makes the subsequent contact time richer and (probably) more interactive than a traditional lecture would have been. But there has still got to be some real world encounter between an academic and their students.

Now there is clearly overlap between lecture capture technology and flipped teaching. Tools such as Panopto can be efficient ways to prepare short videos to be watched before the face-to-face session. But not all flipped classroom preparation is necessarily video based (it might, for example, involve reading something instead). Equally, giving students the opportunity to watch a recording of a lecture they missed is a valuable catch-up tool, but this is not flipped teaching per se.

 

Capturing more than lectures with “lecture capture” technology (paper review)

The July 2017 edition of British Journal of Educational Technology includes a pilot study The value of capture: Taking an alternative approach to using lecture capture technologies for increased impact on student learning and engagement investigating the potential to exploit lecture capture technologies for the production of teaching resources over and above recording of lectures per se.

I was keen to read this paper because I am already using Panopto (the same software used in the study) as a means to generate short “flipped classroom” videos on aspects of bioethics which, it is hoped, students will watch before participating in a face-to-face session. I have also produced some ad hoc materials (which author Gemma Witton terms “supplementary materials”), for example to clarify a specific point from my lectures about which several students had independently contacted me. Furthermore, I have also written some reflections on the impact lecture capture is already having on our courses (see Reflecting on lecture capture: the good, the bad and the lonely).

Reflecting on lecture capture: the good, the bad and the lonely

We have been using lecture capture for about two years. I have to say at the outset that I am a big fan. Having said that however, there are aspects of lecture capture that I find problematic. Here I offer some quick and dirty reflections on my experience of lecture capture so far. This is not a scientific study, and I certainly haven’t gone away and done an extensive literature search, so I may well be rediscovering old truths.

The Good. There are many attractive features of lecture capture. These include:

• Availability for review and revision. This is, of course, the main raison d’être of lecture capture, but it is important not to overlook the value this provides – students can go back over the sections that were unclear the first time.
• Similarly the recordings can be used by those with legitimate cause to be absent (e.g due to illness, away sports fixture, etc)
• Recordings can be useful for the lecturer themselves. We know that the first time you prepare a set of lectures you are likely to have recently read around the subject and be naturally “on top” of your material. The second year can be a different challenge – the slides are in the can, but you may not recall some of the wider points you had made to embellish the on-screen text and images. Listening back to recordings of your own lecture from the previous year can help to fill in the blanks.
• The recordings can also be useful when we have to provide a substitute due to lecturer illness. A few year back, before we had our official lecture capture system, I had to take a semester off due to ill health. Fortunately I had audio recordings which could be provided to my “stunt double” along with the slides. Officially captured lectures can now fulfil this role.
• In times of absolute need the recording can be officially made available in lieu of the live session. We had to use this route when a colleague was ill during the last week of a semester – there was no time to warm up a replacement and rescheduling was not feasible, so we actually showed a recording of the previous year’s equivalent lecture. I “hosted” the session and was really encouraged by the large proportion of the class who turned up in a 5pm slot, knowing that a recording was going to be aired (and that it was already available to them via the VLE).
• Recordings can be built into reflection to help improve one’s own teaching or as part of an informal peer review process.
• The tools for lecture capture can be used to pre-record material as a contribution to a “flipped teaching” model.
• Lecture capture software (certainly the Panopto tool we use at Leicester) includes remarkably powerful inbuilt stats on usage by students. This can shine light on the aspects of a lecture that they felt needed clearer explanation.
• You can change the speed of the recording. This might be slowing it down slightly for better note-taking, or it might be speeding it up (one of my students confessed that they like to listen to lectures by a colleague at a quickened pace because the lecture naturally delivers their material at an unduly leisurely pace).