When I went to university, we didn’t have lecture recording. To be honest, I’ll admit that when I went to university, the ‘AV kit’ in a room was an overhead projector and a chalk board. I struggled with lectures. They were often boring to my 18 year old self and in some subjects they went so fast that my brain couldn’t keep up and I was lost 10 mins in. I’d go and sit through them and usually would come out none-the-wiser and go and spend time in the library frantically reading/catching up after.
Lectures for me, were usually not great learning experiences. I had a very small handful of lecturers who were amazing (like the Geology lecturer who demonstrated the experience of an earthquake in a windowless lecture theatre with a huge stereo and the lights turned off, or brought in his electric guitar as a prop to explain waves to us) and made their lectures memorable. The rest I found hard to engage with. They were passive, if you zoned out (which you did often when you had 3 hours of straight lectures each morning) you would then not understand what followed. You’d then be playing catch up. Sometimes you were literally writing down a copy of what someone else was writing on a blackboard – trying to listen at the same time as deciphering their handwriting. There was no time for reflecting – ‘do I understand what that lecturer just said?’, just a mad dash to write it all down to read it later (if it even made sense at that point).
In one course we did logic as part of the lecture series. I remember being horrified trying to follow along with the lecturer – they were using standard logic symbols/operators (ie V for ‘or’ and ∧ for ‘and’) and then using V, U, W and X’s as the letters either side of the operators. I was almost in tears by the end of the lecture which had been literally this to me: VVW X∧U ¬(VVW)∧(UVX), where I couldn’t tell the V and W’s from each other or the OR’s.
Quite a lot has changed since I was at university (good and bad). Students don’t get grants any more and sometimes have to pay their own fees. So many more students work to allow them to come to uni. I worked and had loans but the scale of the debt was much smaller than students have now.
We’ve also got a more diverse student population than ever – international students, students with disabilities, mature students and those who have caring responsibilities. All of this means we need to be more flexible with how we teach.
Luckily, teaching has also changes (at least a bit!) too. Many lecturers understand the benefits of making lectures more engaging. Some use digital tools like WooClap to add in activities to keep everyone in the zone and also check people are keeping up with the lecture content. Others do more flipped learning experiences which are far less passive and again more engaging than before. Many are happy for lectures to be recorded so it can be rewatched again later. But not every lecture is like this.
We’ve had lecture recording at Edinburgh now since 2017. I may be biased (being the Service Owner of the service now!) but I think it’s a brilliant help for students.
We had more than 37,000 lectures or other activities recorded last academic year. There were well over a million views of those recordings. We’ve switched on automated captioning so that by the time the recordings are processed, they also have computer-generated captions.
Just think about how this impacts the student experience:
- If you miss a lecture because you were poorly or had caring commitments, you can catch up easily. You don’t need to scrabble around asking others for copies of their notes to try and catch up.
- You can rewatch whole recordings but much more importantly, you can rewatch bits of the recording. So if there was something covered you didn’t fully understand or you’d zoned out a bit, you can go back and work through it again/work through it and take notes/decipher chalk board handwriting and listen with enough time to process the content of the lecture.
- You can download a transcript and annotate it, if that’s useful to you.
- You can work through it at your own pace – you can pause to reflect as the lecture goes on or stop, follow up with some supplemental materials and go back to continue when you are ready.
- Recordings (and captions, even if not perfect) are usually really helpful for students who’s first language isn’t English or who for people with some disabilities.
A recorded lecture is, itself, an ‘alternative format‘ to a lecture (we are legally obliged to provide alternative formats for content if requested by a disabled user).
Please, if you can, allow us to record the lectures you give – particularly if they are passive. And wear a microphone so people in the lecture room can hear you and the recordings have audio!
Thank you 🙂
(Photo by Thomas T on Unsplash )
