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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.

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.

From a study in Australasian Journal of Educational Technology.. Some mixed results regarding student perceptions of LC, but perhaps not surprising. Many faculty don't adapt their instruction to the technology, and it's often just looked at as a tool to accomodate students who missed lectures. In these cases, the value is minimal. When students use captures as a supplement to instruction, they typically say that it helped them learn.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.