lecture capture and online ed

From the Blended and Online Learning discussion list:

We’re working on a grant program at my unit to improve these lec-capture courses. One of the ways is to train faculty:

  •  We’ve seen that these courses have very little student engagement, especially for online students for whom this is the main medium of instruction. It’s challenging for the instructors to keep the online student in mind as they teach their lec-capture class. This is not surprising, since they’re essentially being asked to teach 2 different audiences simultaneously  – in class and online. However, given that this is not going to change in the near future for us, we’ve begun exploring ways to train faculty to do a better job given the constraints. Below are some ideas:
    • We are in the process of creating a sort of “checklist” to address things that can be done before, during, and after the class and ways of streamlining the process.
    • BEFORE
      • Make faculty familiar with the technology – do tours of rooms, tutorials, short workshops, etc.
      • Syllabus, Schedule and instructional materials are prepared before the semester begins.
      • Learning objectives, outcomes, and assessments are aligned and made transparent to the students.
      • Design pedagogy that is inclusive – for e.g., move discussions online, create groups that include in-class and online students, use language that directly addresses online students, etc.
    • DURING & at the END
      • Review a sampling of videos at the beginning, middle, and end by ourselves and then with the faculty and provide them feedback on the good, the bad, and the ugly – very discreetly. 🙂 It’s going to be a sort of a joint reflection on the class. We believe if we do this a few times with the faculty, they’ll get the message and will make greater effort to include the online student in their instruction. And doing it 3 times will also make visible the changes and progress they make (or not)
      • We also plan to survey the students at the beginning, middle, and at the end of the semester and share the results with the faculty.

Chunking of videos includes preplanning and post production tasks. Faculty can be trained to script their lectures more, create lecture based on “topics” to make chunking and tagging easier. Need to focus on end user experience (online student).

These are some of the ideas. We plan to start implementing them this summer. I’ll share with you our progress. 🙂

Rema

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Rema Nilakanta, Ph.D.
Director of Design & Delivery|
Engineering-LAS Online Learning
1328 Howe Hall
515-294-9259 (office)
515-294-6184 (fax)
http://www.elo.iastate.edu

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On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 8:48 AM, Nilakanta, Rema [ELO] <rema@iastate.edu> wrote:

Good Morning!

Thank you all for filling out the survey on the use of lecture capture in higher education. I appreciate your time and interest in this subject.

Attached are the results. I’ve also provided an overview below. The main purpose of this survey was to get an overall idea of how lecture capture is used in HE. I was just curious to see if the way we use it is pretty much similar at other institutions. The finding was inconclusive. My next step is to dig a little deeper – perhaps repurpose this survey for faculty and students. The final goal is to improve these courses – make them as pedagogically sound as possible, given that this technology is here to stay at our campus, at least for the near future. It will certainly require designing faculty training, but I would also like to explore innovative and efficient ways of chunking lecture videos pre and post production.

Let me know if you have any questions or need further information.

Rema

OVERVIEW OF “USE OF LECTURE CAPTURE IN HE” SURVEY RESULTS & FINDINGS

By Rema Nilakanta

rema@iastate.edu

I’ve listed some of the findings that impressed me. They do not follow the order of the questions in the survey. For details, please view the attached report.

Just a quick note – There were 39 respondents, but not all responded to every question. The respondents included instructional and IT support staff and administrators at all levels generally from 4-year public and private universities.

FINDINGS & THEMES

  • Echo 365 and Panopto are the most frequently used lecture capture systems, but Adobe Connect also has several users.
  • The computer screen and the instructor feed are most commonly captured (89% and 79%, respectively). However, some also capture the document camera, the whiteboard, and the graphics pen tablet (53%, 39%, and 32%, respectively).
  • Almost every one (97%) report that they support their recordings with additional course materials in an LMS, while many also use web conferencing to deliver lectures and hold office hours. A sizeable portion of respondents also use online textbooks and publisher sites in their course delivery. Only 18% use lecture capture as the primary means of course delivery.
  • The majority of respondents use full class recordings of an hour or more, while around half also use short segments of 20 minutes or less.
  • The majority of the respondents seem to indicate a campus wide use of lecture capture for different purposes:

o   review of in-class lectures

o   training and advising

o   student presentations (students use the technology to create their presentations/demos/assignments)

o   live streaming of seminars and on-site hosting of conferences for remote students and audiences.

  • Size of the support units ranged from 1 person to 150+ people spread across campus.
  • Similarly, there was a wide range for the number of courses that used lecture capture – as few as 1-2 to a 1000 and more, if one takes into account non-traditional uses.
  • Although the numbers show that a majority (77%) provide full IT support for their lecture capture systems, a closer look at the comments indicates there is a general tendency toward making faculty more self reliant by providing them support when requested, or providing them with fully equipped and automated rooms, personal capture solutions and/or training.
  • Majority seemed satisfied with the lecture capture setup, so did the students.  However, it seemed that the knowledge about student satisfaction was more anecdotal than formal. Other observations include:

o   For people satisfied with the setup, there were quite a few users of Echo 360 and Panopto.

o   Panopto seemed to rise above the rest for its promptness and quality of service. Mediasite got mixed response.

o   There seems to be an awareness of the need to get the lectures captioned.

o   Along with automated lecture capture technology, there seems to be a rise in old ways of doing things – manual (human) recording of events continues and seems preferable, especially in the face of rising costs of lecture capture technology.

  • The top 5 challenges concerning faculty support can be summarized as follows:

o   Training faculty to use the technology – turn on the mic, no recording of white board, do not change settings, take time to learn the technology.

o   Funding and support

o   Ensuring best practices

o   Captioning

o   IP concerns

  • Efforts to address these challenges were related to:

OPERATIONS

–       Keep mic on all the time

–       Use of media asset management systems, like Kaltura (MediaSite)

–       Admins trained to check settings for rooms

–       Disable download of recordings as default setting (addressed IP concerns)

TRAINING

–       Create user groups around technologies

–       Promote communication among instructors using a particular room

–       Training of faculty by instructional design teams on the use of technology and best practices

 

here is more on lecture capture in this IMS blog:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=lecture+capture&submit=Search

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