Owston et al’s article claim to contribute a better understanding of the correlation between students’ perceptions of lecture capture and their academic performance. The paper focuses its analysis on higher education and the study is made in a single university.
Based on previous studies, the article aims to point out the impact of the lecture recording on the learning of university students, their attendance at face to face classes, and their grades. The study is reinforced by clear figures that are intended to validate their study as well as their conclusions and correlations. I appreciate that even I struggle to highlight the strengths of the article, I recognise that the authors make an effort to recognise their limitations as well as presenting different resources to bolster their conclusions, using previous studies with similar context.
As a reader, I can have a good general idea of the reality of lecturer recording (in 2011), and see some unexpected results of the impact on the students’ performance. I guess that in 2011 the literature about the use of lecture recording was limited and Owston et al were able to find some correlations and ideas associated with the frequency of viewing and their academic performance. In the paper, there is an effort to give value to the lecture recordings beyond the bad or good influence it has on the attendance of the students, or their grades. Although, I found their suggestions quite underwhelming and with a very essentialism ideology, I want to believe that research in this perspective offers some opportunities for learning, or at least, opens new questions for further studies.
I found many methodical errors in the article. First of all, there is a clear ideology toward an instrumentalist outcome. The five questions formulated in the paper are showing a clear essentialism bias, where the main assumption is that lecturer recording will have a good impact, improving academic performance. In this way, giving an enchantment power to the technology without questioning nothing else. Also, there is a lack of critique and questioning about the results and the study itself, that resonates a lot with Bayne article we read last week.
For me, it is difficult to see how the authors can compare two situations where you have many variables changing and not a fixed context. for example, in the article, they mention a comparison between classes with recording and without it. I see many variables here that are not fixed: the subject, the teacher, the difficulty, the classmates, the schedule. Their findings are supported by other articles, however, there is a lack of clear research methods. The figures, correlations, and assumptions made are difficult to swallow. I am missing a clear research question and hypothesis about what the researchers are looking for.
When I started reading the article, I expected to have a clear image of what is understood for lecturer recording and a description of what can be the pedagogical goal. Instead, we find a poor definition and examination of what is a lecturer recording and lack of complexity and critique about it.
For example, when the authors suggest that high achievers, who watched the recordings fewer times, is because they were only reviewing or checking the content. In my opinion, the authors made an arbitrary correlation here. Maybe high achievers have professional/personal background that helps to understand the content better, or maybe they have a study group, or maybe they found a better video that explained the lecturer, or etc. There are so many possible answers, and I found it quite irresponsible to make a suggestion in only one direction.
Furthermore, I think the data used is quite small, also only is used a single university. Probably the study was relevant considering the date of the publication. However, I think the fact students are the ones reporting the majority of the information it losses credibility. I would like to see more reliable data.
Overall, I didn’t enjoy the article because of the lack of gruelling. But as a conclusion, I would say that this article offered me the opportunity to see a clear instrumentalist approach to the use of technology and allowed me to understand better concepts that were discussed last week, and it helped me to fix concepts.
Owston, R., Lupshenyuk, D., and Widemand, H. (2011). Lecture capture in large undergraduate classes: Student perceptions and academic performance. Internet and Higher Education, 14, pp.262-268.
Hamilton, E., and Friesen, N. (2013). Online education: a science and technology studies perspective. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 39(2), pp. 1-21.
Bayne, S. (2015). What’s the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’? Learning, Media and Technology, 40(1), pp. 5-20.
Edwards, M., and Clinton M. (2018) A study exploring the impact of lecture capture availability and lecture capture usage on student attendance and attainment, pp. 403–421.
