recorded Lectures
Yuhua Hu, Paul McLaughlin
School of Biological Sciences, The University of Edinburgh (UK)
,
Abstract
Lectures for undergraduate biology students are often intensive in content and delivered to a large audience, which magnifies several common problems with lecture as a teaching method. For example, students are often too busy taking notes to pause and think, and those sitting in the back may not be able to see some details shown in a diagram in the lecturer’s presentation. This is why there are an increasing number of students who place their audio recording devices on the podium desk before their lecturer starts a lecture. However, with audio recordings, students find it difficult to associate a lecturer’s speech with the presentation slides used in the lecture accurately. To help students obtain high quality recordings of lectures that sync the lecturer’s voice and presentation material, two lecturers in our school use combinations of digital devices to record their own lectures for students. One lecturer uses a screen capture software and a Bluetooth headset to record his lectures live, and the other lecturer uses the same screen capture software but records his lectures in his office using a tablet PC and a stylus pen. Hence, the recordings are video files that provide the lecturers’ verbal lecturing and the accompanying Powerpoint slides synchronously. The videos are uploaded to the university’s stream server so that students can access them whenever and wherever they prefer at their own paces. This paper will discuss how students make use of such learning resources, their usefulness and potential issues with this pedagogical approach.
Keywords: lecture, recording, screen capture, tablet, streaming, undergraduate, biology.
1 Introduction
Despite the sea-change of the teaching landscape in higher education due to the fast-evolving learning technologies available, lecturing remains a key teaching practice in most institutions around the world. Lecture recording has accompanied this teaching practice ever since recording technologies have become available, from the simple audio cassette recording, video tape recording to fully integrated digitalised audio/video recording (Sheridan 1978; Davies and Andresen 1991; Cross 1996; Cramer, Collins et al. 2007). The delivery methods of such recordings have also evolved dramatically from loan cassettes stacked in libraries, televised programmes, to the modern online streaming and podcasting (Creswell and Lin 1989; van Zanten 2008). Especially, at this Internet era, with the easy access to highly portable recording and playback devices (e.g., digital camcorders, mobiles phones, ipads, etc), multimedia recordings can be created, widely distributed and used by teachers and students at a much lower cost. Whichever format the recording and delivery media, the ongoing debate has been whether recorded lectures are of any visible pedagogical value. This paper will first look at the literature on both students’ and teaching staff’s views on lecture recording, and then present a study on two biology lecturers’ experience in recording their own lectures in two different ways and how their students made use of their recordings.
2 background
In higher education, lectures have been recorded by a wide range of methods as technologies advance. Lectures were traditionally recorded by lecturers or an institute using audio or video recording facilities and the cassettes were stored in libraries for students to borrow whenever needed (e.g., Monash University has been providing students with taped copies of their lectures since 1970 (Buxton, Jackson et al. 2006)). In this digital age, lecture halls in some institutes are fully equipped with digital recording systems with necessary hardware and software systems that record a lecturer’s speech, her writings on the blackboard/whiteboard and her materials presented on the computer screen, and then the entire lecture is available for students to view online anytime anywhere they are (e.g., Cramer 2007, McCrohon 2001, Odhabi 2011). However, the majority of lecture halls around the world are still in their traditional chalk-and-talk form. Only a small number of lecturers, the so-called ‘online mavericks’ (Ellis and Phelps 2000), would endeavour to utilise the limited resources they have to record lectures for their students. As a result, nowadays, there is a trend of students taking a ‘DIY’ [Do It Yourself] approach to recording lectures with their own portable devices (Davis, Connolly et al. 2009). This is indicating a growing need of students for access to lectures after class.
2.1 Students’ Views and Expectations
The literature has shown that university students generally welcome lecture recording. For instance, at the University of Western Australia, using the automated lecture recording system 425 lectures per week were recorded in 2006 and the recordings deposited online received an average of over 10,000 hits per week (Williams and Fardon 2007).
In fact, the ‘Net-generation’ students often automatically expect all course materials to be available electronically and flexibly on demand (McCrohon, Lo et al. 2001; Larkin 2010). When surveyed, students have reported a list of advantages of recorded lectures for their studies:
§ Supporting students who are unable to attend lectures in person (e.g., illness, family commitment, geographical difficulty) (Buxton, Jackson et al. 2006; Williams and Fardon 2007; McCredden and Baldock 2009)
§ Enabling students to review difficult points in lectures, and amend their lecture notes (Soong, Chan et al. 2006; McCredden and Baldock 2009)
§ Allowing foreign students to hear lecturing repeatedly when they have language difficulties: it is naturally more difficult for foreign students than the native-speaker students to focus when they have to comprehend the subject content and the language at the same time (Soong, Chan et al. 2006) and they seem to be ‘eager to be given the opportunity to recap later’ (Davis 2009).
§ Providing a resource for revision for exams: Davis’ project reported that students found ‘it’s a lot more helpful than just doing a past paper with a marking scheme’(Davis, Connolly et al. 2009).
§ Catering for different learning styles and strategies: ‘every bit is going to be important to a different person’ (Davis 2009)
§ Promoting active learning: McCrohon (2001) claims that viewing recorded lectures requires more student interactivity than the provision of lecture notes alone and thus promotes active engagement with the subject. ‘Interactivity’ in this context refers to access (availability of material asynchronously and independent of location), choice (a library of materials to view ‘on demand’) and control (ability to start, stop and review material) (Asensio et al. 2004).
The literature shows a clear growth in the proportion of students who access recorded lectures over the past decade, possibly due to the increasingly mobile and affordable computers and digital players. For instance, McCrohon reported in 2001 that about 15% of students (increased to 25% just before the examination period) used their audio streaming facility. However, within this relatively small portion of students, 92% found it a useful resource and 83% agreed that they would use it on a regular basis. Soong et al. surveyed a total of 1160 students in 2006 on the use of the pre-recorded lecture videos and found that over 90% of them agreed that the videos were useful and should be continued and 48.3% of them viewed selected parts of the recordings repeatedly until they understood (Soong 2006). Similarly, many studies conducted in the subsequent years reported that a large portion of their students made use of recorded lectures most commonly for revision purposes and stated that the availability of lecture recordings aided their studies and reduced levels of stress and anxiety (Copley 2007; Pilarski, Johnstone et al. 2008; Davis, Connolly et al. 2009).
A majority of students appreciate the availability of recorded lectures in their entirety. They believe such resources enhance their learning and help them to achieve better grades, and wish more courses could take up this approach (Soong, Chan et al. 2006; Cramer, Collins et al. 2007; Davis, Connolly et al. 2009). Balfour points out that lecture recording allows students to concentrate in face-to-face sessions on the material being presented and to participate in any discussion that takes place, rather than focusing on taking comprehensive notes when the lecture is their one and only opportunity to hear the information(Balfour 2006). McKenzie 92008) observes that for their students using audio recordings of lectures has been at least as effective as attending lectures.
Students’ attitudes toward lecture recording are overwhelmingly positive, however, some researchers have presented some findings that may advise caution. In particular, some studies have found that although most students regard recorded lectures as useful, the actual utilisation rates are low in their courses(Cramer, Collins et al. 2007), and usage tend to peak just before exam times with each session lasting about an average of 4 minutes (vonKonsky: Brotherton and Abowd (2004)). Taplin, Low and Brown have found that most students place no or little monetary value on web-based lecture teaching even though they agree it is useful. Taplin et al. conclude that services that appear free can be perceived as useful even if they are not used or are not worth purchasing.
2.2 Staff Concerns
Many researchers have discovered that staff perceptions on lecture recording are significantly less positive than their students’, or are even resistant(Buxton, Jackson et al. 2006; Philips, Gosper et al. 2007). The common concerns are succinctly voiced by Rossen: [lecture recording] robs students of the incentive to attend class, threatens the livelihood of the instructor, … and deprives faculty of their rightful intellectual property (cited in Burnett (Burnett and Meadmore 2002)). In particular, it is feared that lecture content could be used as the basis of claims for libel or defamation, and the notion of providing a permanent, redistributable, personal copy of a lecture, as would be the case with the podcast/downloadable format, is a further concern (Buxton, Jackson et al. 2006). In a word, lecture recording is ‘tolerated rather than liked or embraced by lecturers’ (McCredden and Baldock 2009, p.986).
2.2.1 Lecture Attendance
Negative effect on lecture attendance is by far teaching staff’s biggest concern about using lecture recordings. Naturally there is no longer the necessity of attending a lecture physically if it is accessibly in its entirety electronically. Unsurprisingly, some institutions therefore lay down policies that explicitly require students to ‘refrain from asking lecturers to provide taping of lectures or additional teaching materials on-line’ as the recordings are provided to ‘supplement rather than substitute for regular class attendance’ (Buxton, p.103).
However, the accumulating evidences in the literature have proven that this fear is unfounded. Findings from a large number of studies from institutions all around the world have consistently shown that the availability of lecture recordings has only a slight impact on attendance at lectures (e.g., Roberts, Deal, Davis, Pilarski, vonKonsky, Hove and Corcoran, Larkin). The majority of students still value face-to-face lectures, and their preferred instructional delivery mode is a combination of lectures in lecture theatres supplemented by video recorded lectures and uploaded course material (Soong). Davis 92009) quoted some student interviewees as saying face-to-face sessions are more valuable than the lecture captures because ‘you can’t ask questions; there is no actual interaction’ and ‘if you attended all the lectures and didn’t look at any of the recordings you would get a better grade than if you looked at all the recordings and didn’t go to any of the lectures.’
Additionally, as von Konsky et al. point out, ‘physical presence during a lecture does not mean that a student is paying attention, synthesising new information in the context of prior understanding, or developing insights that will foster learning’ (P. 593). McCredden and Baldock claim that the problem lies in a ‘Student Attendance Model’ assumed by lecturers, which equates attendance to engagement and understanding leading to performance. Von Konsky et al. argue that lecture attendance by itself could not be used to predict academic performance as students have much diversified strategies for successful learning. On the contrary, McCredden and Baldock propose that lecturers should take up the Student Engagement Model that highlights the multiple cyclical pathways of student experiences that lead to engagement, understanding and performance. Their study demonstrates that physical attendance at lectures and viewing lecture recordings online have been two comparatively effective methods for engaging students in course content. They conclude that their finding does not suggest ‘a cohort of disinterested, irresponsible students, but instead, a generation of students using whatever means available, including blended learning, to try to obtain good grades’ (p.990).
The clear picture emerging from the literature shows that few students would deliberately miss live lectures on a regular basis and they do not consider the recorded lectures substitutes of the ‘real’ ones, but useful supplementary resources.
2.2.2 Passive or Active Learning?
Many teachers also worry that recorded lectures would make learning uninteresting because: a) they can not convey a lecturer’s enthusiasm for the subject; b) they make learning passive and repetitive (Bennet and Maniar). O’Donoghue, Hollis and Hoskin have noted that there are two seemingly conflicting viewpoints among their academic colleagues: ‘whether the adoption of a recorded lecture system would be beneficial to student learning by way of increased flexible learning provision, or whether effort and money should be better spent on developing staff approaches to active learning, so changing the nature of delivery for many courses from a passive lecture transmission to more engaging and collaborative forms of learning’ (p.769).
Although lecture recordings often lose the social cues and the simultaneous interactions between a lecturer and students, many researchers have countered the notion of passivity in viewing lecture recordings by showing evidences that their students have in fact been actively choosing specific sections of content to review and the flexibility allows different students to focus on different content using their preferred learning strategies (e.g., Davis). Therefore, O’Donoghue et al. argue that the two aforementioned conflicting views may not be as contrasting as expected because ‘students searching, reviewing, discussing, analysing and reflecting on recorded materials for concepts review or revision suggest a means of engagement with learning materials which also lie within the goals of active learning approaches’ (p.769).
Nevertheless, this concern does reflect a common belief of what lecturing is supposed to achieve. Students’ perceptions of the major function of lectures is still primarily delivery of information (McKenzie 2008). Since lecture recordings have largely similar effectiveness in information delivery as live lectures, then can there be better pedagogical use of the lecture time? Balfour (2006) suggests that face-to-face sessions can now become more interactive and focus on more complex issues rather than those already covered.