Group items tagged

Of particular and recurring concern to academic staff is the assumption that access to lecture recordings will result in a decrease in attendance at lectures (e.g. Gosper et al., 2010). In most courses, attendance is not in itself a learning outcome (Newton, Tucker, Dawson & Currie, 2014), therefore the concern over attendance must be the manifestation of a deeper concern over the impact on achieving the actual learning outcomes of the course and on other aspects of student engagement. It is also worth noting that falling lecture attendance is not a new phenomenon. As Massingham and Herrington (2006) have highlighted, attendance has been seen as an issue by lecturers for decades

Understanding the reasons why students opt not to attend lectures can lead to useful information that can inform pedagogic practice. The reasons students give often have little to do with the availability of recorded lectures

Their results revealed that the most important considerations were the predicted outcome of attending the lecture (e.g., Will it facilitate my own subsequent study and learning?), the topic or subject of the lecture (e.g., Will I learn this material better by attending a lecture or by individual study?), whether the lecture will meet the students current learning needs, and personal considerations (e.g., Do I have competing commitments that I view as having a higher priority?), and whether the student had had a previous positive or negative experiences with a particular teacher. Other studies have also highlighted the central importance of the lecturer in attendance decisions.

At a recent Excellence in Teaching award luncheon at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a conversation turned to lecture capture and revealed unexpected impacts.

the students requested he add lecture capture recordings. He agreed. Audio recordings and a data feed were made available on demand so that students could access the lecture materials for review. Brummell's intent was to offer the lecture capture materials as supplements to the classroom experience.

Brummell pointed out that using the cameras has drawbacks. "This means you sit down at the camera," he said. "I don't like that. I prefer to be up and active. With lots of students in the class, you can't really pick out specific students very easily, and no one wants to ask questions." After a few lectures, Brummell noticed that a sizeable number of students had stopped coming to class, presumably because they preferred to listen to the recordings. With the class scheduled in a large auditorium, the students who came to class tended to sit closer to the front of the room and nearer to the professor. While the use of the document cameras forced him to remain anchored to a specific location in the classroom, Brummell noted that because the students were closer, he could look up and talk directly to them. "I started getting to know a few names and faces, especially the students who got there early like me," he said. "I chatted with some of them on a regular basis."

Higher education institutions are increasingly using lecture capture to help their students, according to a 2018 State of Video in Education report from Kaltura. There was a 21% increase in lecture capture use by institutions over the last two years, up from 65% in 2016 to 79% this year. Lecture capture doesn’t just take place in standard lecture halls too, with 10% of all those responding saying they already capture over half of all classes, wherever they take place, and 31% keen to follow their lead. Overall, 88% of respondents across higher education and K-12 (primary/secondary schools) already use lecture capture tools or intend to in the future.

The use of video by students for assignments is on the rise, at 69% this year, up from 59% in 2017. Video feedback on student assignments is also growing and is now used by more than a third of institutions (35%) – up from 27% last year – perhaps due to the growth in remote learning.

Closed captions are in use at over half (52%) of institutions today, while 34% use interactive video quizzes to help students learn more effectively. Mobile apps that make it easy for students to watch videos on the move, or offline, are used by 39% of institutions, and a further 53% are eager to add this capability.

An increasing number of colleges and universities have begun helping students view the variety of their educational experiences in a new way—through a comprehensive learner record (CLR) that documents both academic and co-curricular learning.

From a financial-return perspective, research from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that workers who hold a bachelor's degree earn 31% more than those with an associate's degree and 84% more than those with only a high school diploma.

Some institutions have begun helping students view the variety of their learning experiences in a new way: through a comprehensive learner record (CLR).

Located in Parkville, Missouri, a Kansas City suburb of 5,500 residents, Park University has a main campus of about 2,000 students. However, with more than 40 campuses across the nation and students on more than 30 military bases, the vast majority of Park’s 16,290 students are distance and online learners,

t was designed to provide services to students and connect all those students across the country into one university,

With more than 400 available commands, students can use the university-specific feature to receive answers to frequently asked questions, information about school programs and events, as well as course schedules, grades and GPAs by linking a university ID to Alexa.

Campus-wide lecture capture technology – a way to record lectures – is a major investment for universities, but is hugely popular among students.

The most common concern about recording lectures is that it will reduce attendance. However, most studies do not support this theory. Of my own students, only 5 out of 99 indicated that recorded lectures influenced their decision to attend. Many pointed out that there is added value in attending a lecture because they are able to ask questions.

Students generally do not expect a professionally produced recording, and are happy provided they can hear clearly, the recording is free from background noise and the video is sufficient.

Freed of exorbitant university fees, German students enjoy higher education of a comparably high standard that usually does not see them graduate with a huge pile of debt that then has to be paid off.  Still, a large number of German students decide to leave the “land of poets and thinkers” to pursue degrees at universities in the UK. Despite the costs and the tough application process, about 7,500 Germans head to the UK every year to take up their studies at universities in Oxford, London or Edinburgh, among other destinations.

The crucial factors are tuition quality and the staff-to-student ratio, which many Germans who have spent time studying in the UK say is excellent. With an average ratio of 1:66, German universities have a hard time standing their ground in this regard against rivals in the UK.  For comparison, Bishop Grosseteste University in England, considered one of the “worst” universities with respect to its staff per student number, has an average ratio of 1:25,

“In the UK, staff and students usually interact on a more equal and respectful level than in Germany, and in my experience UK professors are a lot more approachable than their German colleagues.”

In spite of the notion that students could conceivably take online courses from an institution anywhere in the world, two-thirds stick close to home — choosing a college or university within 50 miles of where they live. In fact, 44 percent selected a school within 25 miles of their homes. And the share of students enrolling in a school more than 100 miles from home fell from 37 percent in 2014 to 15 percent in 2019.

An advantage of going local is that the institutions "have greater visibility among employers and others in the community,"

If there were any such being as a "typical" online student, according to the results, she would be female (making up six in 10 students), nearly 32 years old, employed full-time, likely single and childless. Also, she wouldn't be the first in her family to attend college and she would have transfer credits to apply to her degree.

After all, with laptops, students can, in some ways, absorb more from lectures than they can with just paper and pen. They can download course readings, look up unfamiliar concepts on the fly and create an accurate, well-organized record of the lecture material. All of that is good.

But a growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning,

Measuring the effect of laptops on learning is tough. One problem is that students don’t all use laptops the same way.

In 2014, the Florida Department of Education gave a survey to students after taking end-of-course evaluations. The results showed that more students preferred computer tests over paper (53% of the students agreed to that statement). Another study in 2017 Saudi published in the International Journal of Information and Education Technology presented the opposite result. Here, only 42.5% prefer online over paper exam, which is still a considerable portion of the survey population. But while that may be the case, 77.5% of the total examinees liked the fact that they are able to receive results and feedback automatically after taking the test.

Below are 7 reasons to consider when deciding whether to incorporate online methods to your teaching and evaluation, from the perspective of students.

1. Getting test results immediately give students peace of mind

“We are living in an incredible age for learning, when there’s so much knowledge available, that one would think that this is good news for higher education,” Bryan Alexander told me recently. Alexander writes often about the future of higher education and is finishing a book on the subject for Johns Hopkins University Press. “Yet we’ve seen enrollment in higher education drop for six consecutive years.”

In 2015, Georgia Tech formed a commission on the future of higher education, and its 48 members were asked to imagine what a public research institution might look like in 2040.

The primary recommendation of the Georgia Tech report is that the university turn itself into a venue for lifelong learning that allows students to “associate rather than enroll.” Such a system would provide easy entry and exit points into the university and imagines a future in which students take courses either online or face-to-face

Today’s students are intimately connected to the latest technology and gadgets and use them constantly. Their familiarity, combined with an innate and intuitive ability to control it, means that not only do they use video and audio communication for their own social communication but expect it to be present in all aspects of their lives. This expectation extends to the provision of learning services, particularly at higher levels; with the current high cost of educational services, prospective students demand sophisticated and effective use of technology at universities to elevate their education experience. They choose their university on a number of factors, with technology and modern teaching methodologies rating highly in that decision. Universities that fail to meet their expectations are ignored as students vote with their feet and select another establishment.

The process of recording classes and other live sessions, generally referred to as lecture capture, features highly on the lists of students’ criteria during that assessment. While still a relatively young technology compared with others in the AV world, it has rapidly gained acceptance in the academic sector, proving its ability to aid the educational process and rapidly penetrating the industry

Early reticence to deploy and use lecture capture systems has largely abated. Fears that students would skip lectures if there were to be a recording available online later, and lecturers’ concerns over job security once their classes had been recorded, were generally unfounded. Instead the system has stimulated new methods of teaching, including that of ‘flipping’,

Lecture capture has attracted a good deal of hostility recently. One article in Times Higher Education reported reservations from academics about the effect that recording lectures for online viewing could have on student participation and attendance (“University of Huddersfield gives tutorial filming plan green light”, News, 5 July). Another article aired worries that editing recorded lectures might eat into academics’ time, and that they may be used by management to assess performance, or by students to expose staff to ridicule (“Disability cuts lead to universal lecture capture policy”, 28 July). My own experience has led me to a very different view. Early this year, after more students enrolled on my ethics and society course than our school’s largest lecture theatre could hold, arrangements were made to live-stream the lectures into an overflow room. Because the capture system also recorded the lectures, we decided to post them on the course’s online learning platform and see what happened. The results were very positive.

48 per cent of respondents said that the recordings greatly enhanced their learning, with 94 per cent acknowledging some positive impact.

on average, each student viewed the library of 31 lectures 14 times, for a total duration of five hours. Lectures were watched for an average of 22 minutes, indicating selective use rather than passive reception.

But there is room for improvement. Samson, who has an advisory role with Echo360 and tests new features in the classroom, said that he would like to see the confusion alert enhanced to give instructors more information. Currently, the platform enables students to click on a flag when they see a slide in the lecture they don’t understand, but it doesn’t specify what is confusing the student. Richard Caccavale, senior director of product marketing at Echo360, said that he anticipated improvements to the confusion-alert feature to be rolled out later this year. Students will be asked to specify whether it is something the instructor said that confused them or something on a lecture slide. The students will also be encouraged to expand on what they found confusing or ask a question.

One meaningful use of education technology is the ability to change how students can share their voice

Here are a few of things we explore in our discussion (with apologies to regular readers for duplicating much of this list from just a week or so ago

The study focused on the Echo360 system Swinburne introduced in 2014. Under the scheme, lectures are automatically recorded unless academics opt out — something few have done, Dr Pechenkina said.Overall, 71 per cent of students said lecture recordings helped them, and 70 per cent wanted more of it. Just 28 per cent of academics wanted more of their classes recorded, with most saying they would prefer lectures were not taped at all.

While lecture-recording provides greater flexibility for students, “it has the potential to do the opposite for lecturers — particularly those whose teaching approach or subject material does not lend itself readily to current models of recording”.The paper says technological developments could spawn new ways of recording, enabling lecturers to tailor their approach to the cameras. But this, of course, could “further decrease student attendance at lectures”.Dr Pechenkina said lecture recording was unlikely to disappear anytime soon. “We need to train academics better in how to use the technology to enhance their teaching.” She said new advances would make recording less restrictive, with cameras able to “move around and capture widely what goes on in the classroom. The capacity is there, or it can be there within a very short period.”

Dr Pechenkina said academics were also using the technology to prerecord and disseminate lectures ahead of time, allowing class time to be focused on group discussion

The international survey of 1,000 respondents shows a boost in the use of video in distant learning, with almost half wanting to experience video in at least 50% of their classrooms

The results reveal a boom in the use of video for remote teaching and learning with 66% of respondents stating that their institutions now use these capabilities, up from 28% in 2016

Interestingly, 39% of those surveyed state that students studying remotely at their institution are already using video-based solutions to join live classes and lectures, while a further 49% are keen to add these capabilities to their offerings. Remote video capabilities are also being used to let presenters who are not based at the institution to teach and lecture to students, with 54% of all respondents saying that they are already benefiting from this.

‘tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn’ is often attributed to US inventor and polymath, Benjamin Franklin

My mantra is ‘disrupt before being disrupted’. It’s time for today’s digital culture to spread into Business Schools, worldwide

In France, 42% of jobs are under threat of automation, according to the consulting firm Roland Berger (2015).The average projected job loss across OECD countries is 57%, according to a 2016 World Bank Development Report.

The majority of people in education believe that video usage on campus increases student satisfaction with their learning experiences; more than nine in 10 respondents (92 percent) said just that to a recent research project on the topic. The survey was done by Kaltura,

the results show a particular bias: The survey was taken online by those who are "prone to a positive attitude toward video" in education. Respondents consisted of 1,500 " educational professionals, staff, technologists and students," with two-thirds in higher education. Just about three-quarters (74 percent) are based in North America.