Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ PSU TLT
15More

Is lecture capture the worst educational technology? | Mark Smithers - 32 views

  •  
    Should we be investing in a University wide initiative?
  • ...12 more comments...
  •  
    This is a pretty standard critique. Reasons for lecture capture from my readings on class podcasts: Accessibility (physical, sensory, and learning disability), time shifting (TiVo), exam review, increased student satisfaction, ESL students, hybrid learning, and student feedback (on presentations). I could probably list several more. Smithers doesn't really address these kinds of uses. He also mentions that preparing short videos to augment classroom materials is a worthwhile effort, and we'd get desktop capture along with the system that we'd purchase.
  •  
    When I first started thinking about lecture capture, what this article is saying pretty much summed up my position. Lectures represent poor instruction, and all lecture capture does is perpetuate that. I've come to have a more nuanced perspective on this issue than this author seems to have. First, there are certain realities we have to deal with. Large-enrollment courses and large lecture halls aren't going away anytime soon. In fact, they're only going to get more common as higher educational institutions try to operate more efficiently. Given this, as educational technologists, we need to look into technologies which provide the best teaching and learning experience with this contraint. Clickers are a good example of encouraging student engagement in large lecture halls. Lecture capture can improve this situation in a number of ways. If a student falls behind and is not able to ask questions due to the sheer size of a section, they can review the lecture later and engage with peers using the collaboration features of most lecture capture systems. Faculty can use lecture capture to create supplementary materials to supplement their instruction and minimize rote lecture, which may open an opportunity for incorporating critical dialogue in class. There are many other ways to use lecture capture to address the difficult teaching challenge of large lectures. Second, one situation that came up numerous times in my focus groups was that lecture captures helped students particularly in courses where the content was particularly challenging or informationally dense. No matter how good an instructor is, there are times that information presented in a lecture needs to be reviewed, and the presence of a lecture capture system provides that capability. Good systems, like the ones we're looking at, capture multiple sources like slides and document cameras, do OCR to make content searchable, etc., so review is a fairly rich experience.
  •  
    (continued.. Diigo cut off my comment) Third, another affordance good lecture capture systems offer is collaboration. Reviewing a lecture capture is not a one-way consumption of a capture, but rather a place for contextual discussion of course materials with peers, or a place for students to ask targeted questions regarding a particularly difficult section of a lecture. Given that this discussion is contextual, it's often far more useful than an LMS discussion area. Finally, this technology aids teaching by offering instructors the ability to more easily see where students are having problems (via observing what sections they are reviewing the most or where they have the most questions) so they can address this in class. There's more value in lecture capture beyond what I've suggested here, such as in supporting distance or hybrid instruction (another growing need at this institution). Perhaps the problem is in the name 'lecture capture', as this doesn't really encapsulate much of what I just described. And there's definitely a faculty training need created here, in order to help develop pedagogies to properly leverage this technology and not just perpetuate bad teaching. But I think that's the case with any technologies we introduce. In short, this article provides a very one-dimensional view of lecture capture, and is probably based on observations of a small handful of poor uses. I think we can do better, and I am much more hopeful about this technology.
  •  
    I think the original author would argue that the points you bring up would be better suited by series of short desktop recordings. It is a better way to present informationally dense materials. Students can collaborate around the desktop recording as much as a recorded lecture, and analytics on desktop recordings can reveal areas where students are struggling just as well as a recorded lecture. To the first point of classrooms getting larger - maybe it is incumbent on ed technologists to find ways to increase efficiency in ways other than increasing capacity of lecture halls - like allowing faculty to present content from their desktop via the web and rethinking the assumptions of getting everyone together in a large room. I certainly don't have all the answers or all the information, but just a little advocating for the devil.
  •  
    That's a good point, Brad. You're right that desktop capture applications can do some of what systems like Echo360 can do. Something like Camtasia Relay is a good example of a desktop capture app that publishes into a centralized system, which could then integrate into an LMS, blogs, or whatever. I would say that Echo360's personal capture solution might be able to produce a more rich capture of multiple sources, and has some other collaboration and analytics features that Camtasia doesn't (can you tell I've been evaluating these tools for the last two months?). But still, you might say Echo360 is overkill if primarily what you want to do is desktop recording. I'm not convinced that that's all faculty will want to do, or if that's the right approach pedagogically speaking. But I guess that's why we need to pilot this stuff. I agree that packing students into larger and larger classroom isn't the right answer being more efficient. To some extent it's inevitable though, at least until more modern pedagogies that include active and social learning become more mainstream, and there's proven technology to support that on a large scale. Maybe lecture capture is just an interim step towards that model. I'm not sure..
  •  
    this is a highly relevant article for me. by way of background, my director & I have been making the rounds to faculty meetings for the departments in our college (there are 13 in total) to talk about our center and what we do. one of the first comments/questions we get has something to do with lecture capture as a proposed "online course" model. for myriad reasons, I am against the notion that lecture capture can represent the foundation of a high-quality online learning experience. and, in fact, I am positive that the reason it comes up so often is that it is far and away the lowest burden on faculty in terms of effort: no course redesign; no reconsideration of teaching approaches; no change in anything, really, just record an already-ongoing in class presentation and stream it. I think it's lazy work and leads to a subpar instructional experience. that said, I have no issue with it at all as an ancillary resource for a res class. in fact, the content covered in many of our classes would benefit from allowing students to go back and review example problems, equations, in-class demos, etc.
  •  
    At the ELI meeting, I went to an excellent session by some folks at George Washington University where they're using lecture capture as the primary delivery platform for a distance education program. According to them, it works very well and both on-campus and on-line students are happy with the program. My notes are here: http://www.personal.psu.edu/asg102/blogs/portfolio/2011/02/echo-360-at-george-washington.html
  •  
    Lecture capture is just a technology. It can be used poorly (using it to re-broadcast bad teaching) or it can be used well (to prompt students and facilitate in-class discussion). The important thing is to understand its affordances and apply sound instructional design to its use. Again, I think people get hung up on the term "lecture capture" and miss all the other compelling uses of the technology. It take your point though, Gary, and there is a chance that these systems will encourage people to be lazy and call it innovative teaching practice anyway. But isn't that true with any technology?
  •  
    good points, chris. again, my issue is with lecture capture as the foundation (ie primary content delivery approach) of a completely online course. as a way to making materials available outside of a residential course, I think lecture capture has clear application. we've also been working on "classroom flip" models for years in our college, which provide students with recorded lectures in preparation for in-class meetings. our architectural engineering department has done a good deal of these over the years and refined his process. so there is clear value to providing recordings of lectures. my criticisms are in the specific context of online instruction. we're incorporating lots of screencasts and other shorter video clips into courses currently under development, and have been doing so since I joined the center three years ago. but in terms of effective content delivery in an online environment, 50-minute captured lectures are a poor approach; if folks are interested in more info, I have a lit review I assembled last year on this exact issue. in short, long uninterrupted blocks of video are a poor choice for engagement & the realities of learner attention. however, steps can be taken to address these issues with pacing and building in opportunities for learner-to-content interaction within the larger elearning framework. to put another way, many of the benefits of redesigning for distance instruction are not the obvious ones: tasks such as revisiting learning objectives; reconsidering how interaction will work; reconsidering the balance between student-centered and instructor-led content delivery; how central student discussions or presentations are to mastery of specific course goals; and so on. i'm of the mind that simply posting recorded lectures does not force a closer examination of the course, and thus is philosophically equivalent to posting PPT slides/PDFs and calling that an online course. would we (as learning design professionals) la
  •  
    I think it is better than the Aqua Bar, that's for sure ;-). I also wonder if this discussion would have happend as a comment thread to a blog post ... I doubt it. I like that the discussion is happening though. I wonder if we should organize an open discussion with people from around campus to see what they think. Conversations with designers and faculty might prove really interesting. Would the implementation of LC in all GPC's on campus change the design models for web courses or the world campus? Would that be a good thing? I just don't know. Anyone want to consider this as a way to get a larger conversation going?
  •  
    aside: is there a character limit for these comments? I was looking over my second comment and the last 2 paragraphs are truncated. here they are: i'm of the mind that simply posting recorded lectures does not force a closer examination of the course, and thus is philosophically equivalent to posting PPT slides/PDFs and calling that an online course. would we (as learning design professionals) laugh at the notion that posting slides from a lecture constitutes a "quality course?" I think we might. and if we would, what makes a recorded lecture different? in my opinion, not much. and according to the educause quarterly article from 2009, there's no empirical evidence of an impact (pro or con) on grades, test scores or learning outcomes. anyway, thanks for the good discussion. I like this diigo thing, it's certainly got a leg up on delicious in the conversation department. :)
  •  
    regarding a larger discussion, I think there would be interest. some collegues & I talked about it as a possible topic for the all-ld meeting late last fall, but the timing didn't work out. I've had conversations about it with elearing peers because "why don't we just post lectures as an online course?" is a common question from faculty. how, specifically, lc might change things is an interesting question. the ability to quickly & easily capture video would certainly have a benefit to online learning units, even if it's not full lectures. but something akin to a "one button studio" for faculty to create a quick demo/intro/expand on a confounding point? that would be great for sure.
  •  
    It would be great to get others involved in this discussion. Lecture capture has the potential to very broadly affect teaching and learning at Penn State, and there no better time than now to develop our thinking and strategies on the subject. The weekly All-ID meetings and the Learning Design Summer Camp would both be great forums for the discussion. A focused discussion with World Campus would be a good idea as well.
  •  
    agree that all-ld is a good place to talk about things. would you be interesting in providing an overview of the lc committee's work? what you're looking for, how vendors are being evaluated, etc? then perhaps we could segue into a discussion of the larger implications with the group. if that sounds reasonable, we can talk to jeff about getting on the agenda. as for a focused session with WC, that's a good idea. I wonder if it could be a WC + online learning units from colleges, since we'd all be interested in impacts for online instruction.
6More

Why Email May Be Draining Your Company's Productivity - 5 views

  • “Email is our personal to-do list that anybody adds to – whether they know us or not.”
  • Even more so – it seems acceptable to people to be annoyed with you for not responding to their emails.
  • Here’s the thing: I actually do care about responding to people. I will even take to emailing people I don’t know offering small bits of advice. I try to be helpful. But if I spent my day doing this – or many other email tasks – I’d never get ANYTHING else done. Just this evening I’ve done a shit-tonne of emails as those that received them from me can attest. My last one went out past midnight.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • And tomorrow starts with another breakfast meeting. That’s my treadmill. And why I’ll never spend my entire life inside my email box.
  •  
    Smart.
  •  
    If I really have to get stuff done, I'll basically self-impose email 'blackouts' for 2-4 hours. Helps with document and report writing at least. One thing I still haven't figured out...I personally don't mind if people don't respond to my emails if it's just an FYI or an info-dump. But some colleagues seem to *always* want a response from me regarding these emails, even if it's just a "thanks" email. Don't get it :/ Last thing we all need are more emails with a single word in the body.
1More

Web Search: Teaching and Learning with Technology: Using Apps to Enhance Learning for U... - 8 views

  • Honestly, there is already a lot on my plate with teaching and research; however, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with Cole Camplese, Allan Gyorke, Brad Kozlek, and the rest of the TLT folks. (Note: Cole is a definite ‘early adopter’ and teaches a very popular course at Penn State on disruptive technologies.)
1More

A kind request for ANGEL : PennStateUniversity - 8 views

  •  
    Student Reddit thread on ANGEL
3More

OnSwipe - Insanely Easy Tablet Publishing - 4 views

  •  
    "Onswipe enables publishers to provide the best browsing and advertising experience to their readers on tablet and touch devices. Get Started In Under 3 Minutes Infinitely Customizable Anytime. Anywhere. Any device. Breathtaking Ads"
  •  
    During the 7 Things discussion today, we're talking about tools like Flipboard and Zite which are on the aggregation side. OnSwipe is on the production end - creating mobile/touch friendly layouts. Might be nice for the TLT annual report.
  •  
    We'll get this install on wp.tlt.psu.edu soon.
1More

What's New in Google Apps - 3 views

  •  
    I like that they are finally working to share where they are going.
2More

EducationTechNews.com » Blog Archive » The ultimate tech gaffe, according to ... - 7 views

  •  
    Article calls out PSU on its technology policies. Interesting to think about how we might go about fixing it or if students are just bound to be upset about the next thing instead.
  •  
    I was in a meeting with housing folks when I started at SITE. They wanted to run some data to try and help figure out why so many students decided not to stay in campus housing after the freshman year. It doesn't take much data mining...you just have to look at the bandwidth limits and policy, and you have the bulk of your answer. For some reason they couldn't accept that students would move out because of a bandwidth cap.
1More

Next-Gen Classrooms: Aces of Space -- Campus Technology - 3 views

  •  
    Interesting examples of how schools are getting more engagement out of students (even when lecture size has doubled) based simply on the design of the classroom and experience.
6More

Will a Harvard Professor's New Technology Make College Lectures a Thing of the Past? - ... - 3 views

  • Mazur sold attendees at the recent Building Learning Communities conference on this new approach by first asking them to identify something they're good at, and then having them explain how they mastered it. After the crowd shared, Mazur pointed out that no one said they'd learned by listening to lectures. Similarly, Mazur said, college students don't learn by taking notes during a lecture and then regurgitating information. They need to be able to discuss concepts, apply them to problems and get real-time feedback. Mazur says Learning Catalytics enables this process to take place.
  •  
    anyone familiar with Learning Catalytics? sounds like it's invite-only, but might be worth a look.
  • ...2 more comments...
  •  
    I saw something else along these lines at ELI this year (I'll have to look up the notes). It was mostly about organizing students into discussion groups and assigning them a topic, role, position on the issue, etc... I could see us doing a hot team on several of these technologies. But about the flipping the classroom part of this article, we'll probably open a "Flip the Classroom" engagement initiative this fall to explore multiple approaches to creating the class preparation materials and in-class activities. Some of this is related to the Kahn Academy discussions we've been having. Some touch the lecture capture software that faculty could run in their offices to create personal captures going over material or key points. Anyway, I'd like to open this up to the creativity across Penn State and see what approaches people propose.
  •  
    Awesome article! This is very similar to the way we are designing the modules for our NIH project. Allan, I would love to be part of "Flip the Classroom" engagement initiative this fall. If there is anything I can do please let me know.
  •  
    an engagement initiative seems like a good idea. many of the approaches are implementations of active learning strategies, and I think having faculty from multiple disciplines exploring and sharing is a good way to test the effectiveness of various approaches. we just met with faculty from architectural engineering who've been flipping since 2008. one observation they made was that they flipped to allow student teams to work on group projects during class time. I had always thought that was a good idea for logistical purposes (especially in a team-heavy college like engineering), but they made a point I had not thought of: using classroom flip in that manner also allowed for the teams to have access to faculty advice and guidance while they were meeting to work on their projects. that seems like it may have huge benefits, especially at key points in a group assignment. all a long way of saying, there's much to learn. the blended learning initiative was essentially a 'classroom flip' approach as well, so some of the ways faculty adapted instruction for those courses might be relevant here too.
  •  
    Angela: Let's talk about it. Gary: Tapping into first-hand experience would be great. I know a bit from the National Conference on Academic Transformation conference. The example that comes to mind is a flip where students learn about math through some short (5 minute) video tutorials and then attend "class" in a lab environment to work in teams and get access to the GA and faculty. It taps into a lot of the features of "student engagement" as measured by the National Survey on Student Engagement with factors such as increased student-student work, collaborative problem solving, immediate feedback, and increased student-faculty contact. Overall, an excellent design.
1More

ePub addon for Firefox - 3 views

  •  
    This FF extension lets you read ePub files right in your browser...this way the file is processed for you without additional software/devices/
2More

Higher education: Is it really the next bubble? | The Economist - 6 views

  •  
    Interesting surface level exploration of the edu bubble.
  •  
    this came up in conversations with friends last week. I have my own opinions on the value of non-education people seemingly always claiming to have answers to very complex, deeply entrenched societal issues (like k12 & higher ed), but I'll try to keep from editorializing too much. I will say that one of the convincing arguments I have heard recently was the view of higher education as a commodity in a positional marketplace; in other words, colleges compete based upon reputation and relative position to one another. when seen that way, it makes more sense why money brought into the college is not spent to keep tuition costs down; colleges have to try and outdo their peers with facilities, expansion, etc. as a result, tuition rises. finally, as mentioned in the article, if the positional argument is to be believed, it may make sense to see higher ed as a tiered structure (it already is this way in reality), and concerns about tuition increases might be focused on how we can help ensure that state-funded schools resist the temptation of entering into budget arms races with elite-level privates.
1More

Comparing E-Readers-And Tablets | November 2011 | paidContent - 2 views

  •  
    Nice comparison view of e-readers!
3More

NYU Professor Catches 20% Of His Students Cheating, And He's The One Who Pays For It R... - 6 views

  •  
    Interesting case of instructor getting a low SRDP after he tells class he has identified plagiarism. He suggests peer review instead Turnitin.
  •  
    I think it's all how you approach it. Andrew and I have both caught students plagiarizing before we handled those issues privately. It never affected our ratings from the other students because they never knew that it happened. From the professor's blog post and response to this article, it sounds like he did a public witch hunt. Have you caught students cheating before? How did you handle the issue?
  •  
    I would agree with you about privacy, but if enough students are caught in one incident, word will get around. Ironically, all of the incidents I had to deal with were because of collaboration gone too far. I try to warn students about what I expect ("your own words") , but I think I will be ramping up training on how to really avoid academic dishonesty issues this semester.
2More

In college, it's not so much who lectures as how the teaching is done, Nobelist's study... - 2 views

  • He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.
  •  
    story about clicker use that vicki williams found. I'd be less inclined to think it was that big a deal (it's only one study, not a meta-analysis, etc), but it's being published in Science is huge in terms of visibility.
2More

Economics Game Ramp Up: Effective Achievements - Zac Zidik - 6 views

  • The real challenge in designing this game will be designing it so that there are many paths to success and and many paths to failure with all the mediums inbetween, while continually keeping the player informed on how they are doing in regards to the "expected achievements."
  •  
    Good post from Zac on design elements for game achievments.
3More

10 Ways Open CourseWare Has Freed Education | MindShift - 1 views

  • The decision by the MIT faculty in 2001 to allow anyone to use their course content was a seminal move,  one that had a profound effect on democratizing education.
  • ALLOWING CUSTOMIZATION. MIT OCW is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-Non-Commercial License. That means that teachers and learners are able to share and remix the content that’s available.
  • ENCOURAGING SHARING. Do educators have an ethical responsibility to share? Open CourseWare reminds us that a large part of our role as educators is to share knowledge, and we should work to remove the barriers that make that possible.
3More

BBC News - Internet's memory effects quantified in computer study - 5 views

  •  
    Good article. You know CHAT (the learning theory), right? I like it because it considers our tools and environment as part of how we (collectively) learn. Our cell phones and laptops and Google are part of the equation. So yes, Allan's brain may remember less at a given time, but Allan+iPhone+Google remembers many orders of magnitude more and with much more accuracy.
  •  
    We talked about this quite a bit in our Disruptive Technologies course with Cole and Scott in terms of distributed intelligence, which is similar to what you're saying in that the tools we use are extensions of our minds. Maybe it's because I'm a SciFi geek and have read so many post-apocalyptic books, or perhaps it's just that I know technology too well to trust it, but my biggest fear about what this research is suggesting is that, should our technology disappear, we'll all turn into gibbering idiots because half our mind has been turned off, literally. Realistically, I know that the human brain is much more plastic and our memory would reconfigure itself eventually. And the benefits of extending ourselves like this probably outweigh the risks. But it still gives you pause for thought..
  •  
    Right now, our dependence on instant gratification knowledge isn't too bad, I'm sure we'd have a feeling of disconnection and lots of frustration. I'd consider buying a set of encyclopedias again. I worry more about a scenario like running out of fuel without energy alternatives. The human race is so dependent on fuel for food production and transportation that we'd run into a starvation issue very quickly. We've lost our survival skills and there are just too many of us.
4More

Chomp, chomp chomp! Welcome ScreenChomp and TechSmith Labs! (Visual Lounge) - 5 views

  • ScreenChomp is a digital whiteboard that users can write and draw on with the touch of a finger. You can draw using twelve different pen colors. All activity on ScreenChomp can be easily recorded and then if you want, edited through Camtasia for Mac or Camtasia Studio. The videos produced in ScreenChomp can be downloaded as MP4 files, making them easy to share on ScreenChomp.com, Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, Blackboard and other video hosting platforms.
  •  
    another ipad app for screencasting. as far as I know, this is the first example of an app from one of the big established screen capture software companies.
  •  
    I downloaded it (for free). It's very nice. I tried ShowMe before, which also lets you write and record what you're saying, but there is too much of a time delay between your drawing and it showing up on the iPad. ScreenChomp is much faster. Another advantage is that you can see your recording before posting it.
  •  
    we had the same delay complaint with showme. also didn't like that there were no export options outside of posting to their site.
1 - 20 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page