PSU Lecture Capture

In large lecture courses, it can be challenging for instructors to address student misconceptions, supplement background knowledge, and identify ways to motivate the various interests of all students during the allotted class time. Instructors can harness instructional technology such as screencasts, recordings that capture audio narration along with computer screen images, to supplement the lecture with content that addresses the diversity in student academic backgrounds, motivations, and interests, to extend the classroom experience, and reach the individualized needs of students. This study documents the strategic use of screencasts in a large introductory Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) course, and examines their impact on student usage and course performance. To assess the efficacy of screencasts, students were surveyed to determine how they used screencasts and whether they perceived these resources to be helpful. In addition, we correlated student usage based on website hits with student performance (e.g. final grade) to determine statistical significance. Since the course is comprised of students from different academic and social backgrounds, we also analyzed usage and performance patterns for particular student subgroups. The results indicate that students perceive the screencasts to be helpful and tend to use the resources as a study supplement. Overall, usage of screencasting in its various forms is positively and significantly correlated with course performance as indicated by the final grade. The most substantial gains were found for students with the least amount of prior exposure to concepts in the course material. These results indicate a potential for screencasts to address the various academic needs of students in a large lecture environment.

Quite an interesting study. It looks at academic performance in terms of final course grade in a Material Science Engineering class with reference to screencast usage by different groups of students. The groups were created based on gender, race, citizenship, academic status (sophomores to seniors) and major. Usage was measured by the number of website hits per student. Screencasts of homework solutions and 'muddiest point' solutions had the highest number of views. Under Represented Minorities (URM) and sophomores did not benefit from viewing screencasts, non-citizens and Industrial and Operations Engineers did. Gender was not correlated with usage or performance.

Toppin (2010) surveyed students and faculty of selected courses in the Winston-Salem State University about their perceptions of LC. The courses had high drop, fail or withdraw rates. Although Toppin found significant differences between the two groups, neither groups reported lowered attendance and both thought the LC system was beneficial to learning. Most professors recorded live and did not flip the classroom. Students thought the videos helped them understand, review and access course materials better.

Not a bad article, but I'm finding most of the work by these authors (they have numerous articles) is simply a re-packaging of the same study. If you've read one article by these authors, you probably don't need to read many more. The data above is interesting, showing the massive disconnect between a student perception that lectures can be easily replaced by LC, and a faculty perception that LC can't replace a f2f lecture.

Something I had not thought of before...lecture capture to alleviate a professor having to give the *same* lecture 3-5 times over the course of 2 days. This likely won't impact many tenure and tenure-track faculty, but the lecturers and instructors of the university that often teach multiple sections of the same course each semester...lecture capture might work great for them, not only to open up course time but also save their voices!

this is another good use case that I hadn't thought of; profs teaching two sections of the same course in the same semester. wonder if any of the people from the classroom spreadsheet were doing multiples of the same class? I think maybe some of the ECON folks were...

It is an interesting use, as you point out Gary, but the ECON profs that we identified were course authors of online courses, but do not teach them.

whoa, pretty interesting...

Sorry if anyone already talked about this, but this page lists resources for both faculty and students created using data from the study of Australian universities (Gosper et al, 2010 - posted on mendeley and google doc). I think they look pretty comprehensive and easy to access. Interestingly, suggestions for faculty members in part include student reflections about lecturing. The original report can also be downloaded here.

A descriptive article on varying initiatives at different universities in the use of lecture capture - including to support traveling student-athletes, classroom flip, and student-created "re-mixes" of tagged lecture clips.

had not thought of traveling student-athletes, but that's a great point. within our college, we have students competing on the EcoRace, Solar Decathlon and other teams, as well as short trips to developing nations for our service-learning courses. had not thought of them, but LC would be a useful resource for that population.

thought the group might find this amusing. not sure about connect & kaltura, but the last bullet point re: easy capture for desktop and classroom seems interesting...

condensed annotated bibliography from NC State that I mentioned at today's meeting. I have the longer report from the author in PDF format and can share it via email if people are interested.

the PDF can be downloaded here; this might be a good model to follow for the LD/staff resources that we create, it's easily digestible. my only issue is that it poses lots of questions, so I'd want a bit more by way of info.

This study looks at student perception of lecture capture against student performance in large lectures. Interestingly, they suggest that higher achieving students use videos less often than lower achieving students.

Wow, that's interesting. I can't remember which article, but one study claimed that it's the high performers that use it the most. I think a lot of these studies are finding different results...making our jobs a bit more difficult sifting through it all.

Proposal from someone at U of Texas (Gary - if you know the author, James Henson, might be worth an email) to do a specific research study using UT students and faculty to address two well-defined research questions. Some good citations included as well. I still have not come across any studies comparing the impact of lecture capture that has been pre-recorded for viewing vs. lecture capture that has been recorded from within a classroom. I have a feeling that pre-recording a lecture, by yourself in a room looking at a camera, vs. simply recording an actual live lecture in a classroom, has some tangible benefits for students.

I poked around, and here is the full report: http://magenta.cit.utexas.edu/turnbull/about/publications/internal-research-reports/echo360-pilot-fall-2009-results/ that is referenced in this proposal.

While it contains mostly anecdotal experiences with online video, this article discusses the practice that several professors adopted of creating shorter lectures for online and face-to-face instruction.

In case you're wondering what the group badge says..

hulk is very insightful! wonder if we can add him to our team...

more on classroom flip. reiterates what we discussed at the first meeting: offering streaming lectures is only half the job; the other is using the newly freed time in an instructionally effective manner.

Good find and it led me on an hour-long jaunt through the links and the 20-minute Khan TED talk. Lots to spew out about this, but the short of of it (I wish diggo had formatting, like bullets or line breaks!): The 'Flipped Classroom' is simply a nuanced version of active learning. Proponents of active learning talk about these sorts of things for decades as best practices for an instructor's use of in-class time. The only difference is that we are now replacing the text book with a video. Which moves us to implementation and adoption. Some of the things I already hear instructors saying: My students won't watch videos of a lecture! Why would they do that when they already don't complete reading assignments?", "This won't scale, I can't use this model with 100+ kids in a lecture hall", "I will NEVER have time to do this. Create in-class activities to facilitate during my class time? That takes a TON of work and I won't get rewarded for it." and now we're off on the P&T discussion and how teaching is devalued compared to research grants and publications. I do think we can take an incremental approach to adoption, especially from the standpoint of the Schreyer Institute. For resident instruction, I could see our consultants working with faculty to 'flip' say, a week's worth of content and assist in the development of active learning elements to leverage in class. We already do this with a lot of faculty, trying to steer them away from lecture and into more active learning practices. This is just a step further, but we would probably need help from someone (media commons maybe?) on best practices for the design of the lectures being captured.

totally agree on the active classroom approaches & the systematic barriers to doing these kinds of things. these approaches have been around for a while; you're right that what's new might be the ease of recording video for students to view. as for P&T, it's a real issue. flipping the class will take more time and might not be rewarded. in a college like mine, with almost no contingent faculty, it's a huge issue. as a consequence we have mostly tenured folks, and a handful of very brave pre-tenure assistants, who've agreed to work with us on various projects.

Chunking content, speaking faster and with more energy, closer and more intimiate camera angles, integrating multimedia are all very good techniques for making instructional videos more watchable for students. I think it's interesting that a bad lecture seems even worse on video. Maybe lecture capture will serve to magnify the failings of un-engaging instruction and nudge faculty towards more focused and well-designed presentations.

hey jeff, here's a link to some slides from one of their presentations (not sure when it's from, there's no date): http://www.powershow.com/view/2a5f8-ZDBiN/Recording_of_Educational_Content_and_the_classroom_Flip_flash_ppt_presentation

Thanks :)

One thing I'd like to push our group to do is start from the ultimate end-user's perspective-- the student. If the instructor is going to use this tool we should help her/him maximize the value by first exploring student use cases. Do students use these options now? For what? How do the use it? Does it suit a certain kind of student? Certain kind of discipline or course? We could see what data we can collect from the university and others as well. This may give us insight into what disciplines & content, and thus what instructors, this tool would best support. I have a hunch that the way video is produced now it is under-used and not as effective as it could be because we're not starting from the student POV. Thoughts from others?

The most obvious use case that I found in the literature (and this is primarily from a face-to-face instructional setting) is for exam review. That is when the studies reported (by far) the highest usage. The other use that comes up a lot, that I would consider a best practice, is to use tape a portion of a lecture, on your own, with a laptop, and have students view it before coming to class. The perception data some of these people throw around (especially Echo 360) claim that 85-95% of kids want lecture capture. Some of the studies indicate that only 30-40% of students use the actual recorded lectures, and most of these students are the high-performing, highly motivated students. In terms of the students, we talked today a bit about the importance of meta data and a very accessible, user-friendly lecture capture platform. I can't recall which study, but the number one reason students did not access the lecture capture video was that the platform was too confusing to use.

Gary & Bart, Thanks for the insight. I'd be willing to wager the percentage of student use is closer to 30% than 95%. One thing Gary provides us is specific college instances. Is it worth looking at these from a student perspective first? We can than approach instructors with some insight & reasoning for the approach. Kate, what about some specific Liberal Arts instance? Thoughts from everyone?

Interesting, if not biased, research. Echo 360 really floods the LC literature with this sort of thing, and I'm not entirely sure that they're not cherry picking findings in a non-scientific way. Of course they're a vendor and that's to be expected. I just take it with a grain of salt.

good comment. my initial interest was piqued by the rather large n for the study (2,000 is pretty good for ed tech research). you have to request the white paper and it's then emailed to you, so if anyone else wants to check it out let me know and I can send it along to you and you can avoid getting on echo's spam list... the study itself is interesting in that it asks about a pretty diverse list of perceived benefits of LC. it should be noted that half of the respondents are at medical or public health schools; I guess that just happens to be a big client base for echo. they also break things down by undergrad and grad responses, which is another way our group could go if we so choose (ie. are there distinct differences in use for UG vs. grad, etc).

Chris, interesting question. I think any means that enables reflection on practice could help, if implemented properly. Tools like LC afford the opportunity to dissect & reflect on the actual performance, something teachers do not always get to see. Personally, seeing myself from the outside like that always humbles me & makes me want to improve. A video capture tool as part of a development kit could be a critical piece to improving performance. But, I'd want to explore this developmental idea further. My fear is we would not introduce LC properly &, with the best of intentions, doom it to mediocrity at best. What do you think of LC for this use? We'd have to think about the cost, audience, buy-in, etc. But from a pedagogical perspective as well? Jeff

I think, at the very least, an archive allows an instructor to go back and look at things. so in the event that reviews are consistently bad, it could be a resource for evaluation and improvement. this would have to be an opt-in decision, though. my guess is that, at least early on, most faculty might not like the idea of being recorded for evaluation purposes. I have no evidence of this, just my sense of things.

I can't highlight stuff in the PDF, but the bulk of this document is a technical overview of the "what" and "How" of UM's pilot. They do have a decent pedagogy section. Some stats: - 1.9 to 4.5 day lag time to post videos after recording. Sounded like most of this was due to not having an automated system, but also due to trying to ensure accurate meta data surrounds the video when it goes online. - 30-50% used videos on a regular basis, most accessed through the web (they had ability to go through iTunesU) - Heavy use by ESL students - 40% students reported ability to watch lectures led to increased attention in class.

good find re: ESL. I wonder how often LC is being used for foreign language instruction in general... non-native english speakers might see a huge benefit from this, that's an aspect I'd not thought of.