a. understanding and engaging with legislation, policy and standards
Lecture Recording at the University of Edinburgh: a tale of two Schools
Description
The University of Edinburgh has been using lecture recording in an informal capacity for around 10 years. In 2017, they invested several million pounds in a new centralised service with the aim of rolling this out more widely. For 2017-18, the policy was an ‘opt-in’ one. Those lecturers who wished to record their classes for the benefit of their students could do so (if using a room which had the appropriate equipment installed). However, from 2018/19 onwards, the University changed this policy to an ‘opt-out’ one: any lecturer who does *not* want to record their classes and release them to students would need to submit an application requesting as such, and giving a reason why.
Lecture recording obviously carries with it implications for copyright. Firstly, there is the issue of lecturers working with materials (texts, videos, graphics, illustrations protected by copyright) which they are using in their teaching, and assuming ‘fair use‘ / ‘fair dealing‘ applies. However, outside the (assumed) safe space of the lecture theatre, what are the consequences of using these materials? Does ‘fair use’ / ‘fair dealing’ still apply? Or will they have to re-write a lot of their lecture materials to ensure only those with appropriate permissions are included? The University has been running parallel workshops on Open Educational Resources (OERs) to encourage colleagues to use OERs where possible (and contribute their own labour to OER repositories) but a lecturer, short on time, is unlikely to prioritise this over other work.
However, there is another concern amongst many academic colleagues. Particularly in a research-intensive University such as Edinburgh, lecturers are encouraged to practice ‘research-led’ teaching. So, a lecturer, currently participating in research not yet published, refers to this in their teaching. What happens if the recording of that lecture ends up on the open web and someone steals their idea(s)?
There are two ways of looking at this. Firstly, the lecturer could be concerned that by recording their lecture, the risk that their labour is stolen increases. The alternative, of course, is that by recording their lecture, they are protecting their intellectual copyright. They can prove that, on a given day, this idea, this labour, belonged to them.
Finally, when working in an Art School offering courses such as Music on Screen, there is an additional concern. Students are required to watch particular cinematic texts and use clips of them in their assignments. Youtube will recognise unauthorised use of copyrighted material and take-down any associated videos. The University of Edinburgh has its own media streaming server which can prove very helpful in situations such as these. However, again, with the automatic recording of lectures, (how) can we be sure that these won’t end up on the open web? And if they do, who is at risk of prosecution? Will the University policy cover our academic colleagues in situations such as these?
Add to this, recent GDPR legislation and you can understand why lecturers may be nervous.
To address these concerns, University Senate Learning and Teaching Committee developed a Lecture Recording Policy which was adopted in January 2019. One of the consequences of this policy was to restrict access to lecture recordings to only those students currently enrolled on the course. Another was to enforce a retention policy on the recordings themselves. When I worked in ECA, and chatting with colleagues across the University, this enforced restriction is popular. It was therefore interesting to me that, when I moved to the School of Informatics, I was frequently being asked how I could circumvent this restriction to allow us to more easily share our lecture recordings with the world. The culture at Informatics is an open one. Course materials are made available to the world, and lecture recordings are seen as no different. My task, therefore, was to find the most efficient way of making our lecture recordings more widely available. To this end, I consulted with all teaching staff in Informatics, inviting those who wished to archive and / or make their recordings more widely available to get in touch with me. I now have a list of courses, with associated recordings, which need to be archived. I am currently in the process of recruiting a couple of summer interns to perform this work.
Evidence
Email to teaching staff colleagues
Melissa Highton’s presentation at ALT conference
Media Publisher Job Description (Intern)
Reflection
From an operational point of view, it is unfortunate that the implementation of the lecture recording service (branded as Media Hopper Replay, using Echo360 hardware and software) does not allow for variation across Schools. As a result, considerable time and effort (currently estimated at 240 hours) is required to archive and / or share more widely a resource which could, as the technology allows, simply be achieved at the press of a button. However, from a strategic and public relations perspective, this is understandable. As Melissa Highton referenced in her presentation at ALT Conference earlier this year, trust, once broken, can be very hard to regain.
b. understanding and engaging with legislation, policy and standards
Electronic Management of Assessment policy in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Description
Edinburgh College of Art, despite having the word ‘College’ in its name, is now considered as a ‘School’ within the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2015, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of CAHSS introduced a College wide policy of Electronic submission of assessment and delivery of feedback and can be summarised as follows:
“CAHSS are expecting as close to 100% electronic submission of assessment and delivery of feedback as possible, where pedagogy allows.”
This coincided with two schools within ECA (Art and Design) moving from a customised VLE towards the centrally supported VLE (Blackboard Learn).
The roll-out of the project therefore brought with it many challenges (as well as benefits). It was clear that we needed clear and consistent policies and procedures which could be used across the various subject areas and teaching offices within ECA to ensure students understood what was expected of them and, in turn, what to expect if certain requirements were not met.
I was responsible for drafting a response to this policy, and suggested possible approaches to meeting the challenges it brought.
One of the main challenges this policy brought, along with moving towards a central VLE, was that it ‘surfaced’ a lot of previously ‘hidden’ assessment practices.
It was common for many Art and Design courses in particular to simply state ‘100% portfolio” when asked to describe how the course will be assessed in the course descriptor (mention how this is the principal document students refer to when deciding on whether to take a course). Now we were moving towards greater transparency for students, we were faced with the challenge of harvesting this information from course organisers. Course secretaries were then responsible to collate this information and use it to set up the appropriate assessments on Learn.
So, we needed to do the following:
- Collect and collate assessment information from course organisers
- Use this information to choose the correct assessment tool on Learn
- Create assignment on Learn
- Issue appropriate instructions to students.
The course secretaries involved with this task were the most technically challenged members of the team. They were also having to learn a new system (Learn) and therefore there was a steep learning curve. I attempted to address this skills gap and learning curve by automating any procedures I could. I therefore did the following:
- Created a form on Sharepoint (ECA’s intranet) with fields for the data we needed to collect – eg:
- Assignment deadline date
- Formative or summative?
- What was being submitted?
- Were students to receive a grade + feedback, or just a grade?
- Were students to receive multiple grades, mapped to learning outcomes etc
- I worked out there were six possible sets of instructions for course secretaries, based on the responses to the above questions. I created these (see attached)
- I created variables within Sharepoint which were based on possible answers to certain questions in the form
- I created a workflow on Sharepoint which acted as following:
- When course organiser completes form send an email to course secretary notifying them
- Email to course secretary is customised based on variables (eg, if course organiser has selected that an originality report is required for this assignment, and there is only one marker on the course, suggest workflow called “TII SinlgeGrader”)
- Email would contain a link to suggested workflow
- All the course secretary would then have to do, is follow one or two pages of instructions on setting up the appropriate assignment on the VLE.
Evidence
Learn_MultipleLO_SingleGrader Electronic assessment and feedback 20150211
TII_MultipleLOs TII_SingleGrade Learn_SingleGrade_MultipleGraders
Learn_SingleGrade_SingleGrader Learn_MultipleLO_MultipleGraders
Reflection
Perhaps predictably, it didn’t work out quite as expected.
Firstly, the course secretary who faced the steepest learning curve simply deleted the emails (this should tell us something about the undisclosed stress she may have been feeling). Secondly, not all course organisers responded to the request(s) to complete the form. Of those who did, many entered incorrect data.
So, despite it seeming (to me) like a useful response to a particular challenge, it didn’t meet the needs of the business because people don’t always behave in predictable ways.
Therefore, when we still faced the same issue a year later, I ran almost daily drop-in clinics, promoted to course organisers and situated in the same building as them, to encourage them to come and talk through the information we were asking of them, to ensure the data we had was correct. The response to this was pretty good, and we were able to accurately update about 60% of the courses with assessment information we had confidence in. I then ran three separate days of support for course secretaries, where they had time and space (away from their desks and associated distractions) to create all assignments based on this data. I was on hand to answer any questions they may have.
