Lecture Capture at Loughborough - Update

  1. Introduction
  2. Installations
  3. Support
  4. Usage
  5. IPR issues
  6. Benefits of lecture capture
  7. Feedback from students
  8. Feedback from staff
  9. Use by elite athletes
  10. Lecture capture and attendance
  11. Loughborough lecture capture conference July 13
  12. Archiving and re-use

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1)Introduction

The ReVIEW automated lecture capture service at Loughborough, based on the Echo 360 commercial system, was first piloted on campus in Semester 1 2009 by Prof Chris Szejnmann and Dr Marcus Collins from PHIR, as part of a suite of learning technologies that they introduced on the then new History programmes. The pilot was very successful, from the perspective of the module tutors involved, but also from the perspective of the students who were (and continue to be) very positive about the benefits.

Since 2009/10 the service has grown organically, in terms of both infrastructure and usage. It is now recognised and resourced as a mainstream central service. To date, ReVIEW has been an opt-in service for module tutors, with only a limited number of cases so far where it has been adopted strategically at programme level. Notable examples are the MSc REST (the biggest users in terms of student views) and MSc programmes / modules in Materials with DL students.

This is the same position as that adopted by most institutions to date, but increasingly institutions are looking to move to the next stage, where lecture capture becomes as routine as use of the VLE. Aston, Bath, Essex, Newcastle and UCL are some of the institutions we are aware of which are now doing lecture capture ‘at scale’. In the case of Essex, this now means that, by default, all lectures across the institution are now captured and published via the VLE unless an opt-out is invoked.

Loughborough is now recognised as having considerable experience of using lecture capture, in some innovative ways, and has an opportunity to gain competitive advantage over other peer institutions through wider strategic adoption of a learning technology which is much appreciated by students.

2)Installations

As of 22/11/13, there are 66 rooms equipped with automated lecture capture facilities. Of these, 20 have ‘fixed’ installations (using a hardware ‘capture appliance’ installed in the podium. The others use the ‘classroom capture’ software-only variant. The format of the resulting capture looks the same to students, although fixed installations are capable of higher capture quality and also support simultaneous capture / live streaming (which is now being used by CREST on the MSc REST programme).

3)Support

The ReVIEW lecture capture service is jointly supported by Teaching Support (FM), IT Services, and the Teaching Centre, and it has been an excellent example of cross-service collaboration since its inception in Semester 1 2009/10. The different aspects of supporting the service are distributed as follows:

  • Teaching Support take the majority of bookings for the system and schedule recordings via the online Echo System. SA
  • Teaching Support are responsible for the A/V installations.
  • Teaching Support send out technicians across campus at the start of lectures if the lecturer is new to the system, to ensure that everything is functioning correctly.
  • IT Services (the E-learning System Team) are responsible for the server infrastructure, including regular upgrades to the system (as of September 2013, V5.3).
  • The Teaching Centre E-learning Team promote the system, provide user training (bespoke and scheduled), and assist with editing / publishing to Learn.

All support requests and bookings should be addressed to . Further information, including case studies etc, is available via the E-learning Blog at and .

4)Usage

Some key figures: as of 22/11/13, there are

  • 2552 captures on the system, of which 537 have been recorded since 1 October 2013. This represents a threefold increase in captures compared with the same period last year.
  • There are 199 staff registered on the system, the majority of whom are module tutors.
  • The MSc REST programme has had over 40,000 views since January 1st.

To put the number of captures into context: in 2012/13, UCL had over 9000 captures, Newcastle over 10000, and Essex close to 20000. This Semester, Newcastle are capturing over 300 hours of lectures every day.

It should be noted too that, unlike UCL which has a policy of only capturing academic lectures (this even excludes inaugurals), at Loughborough we have promoted the service as being suitable for recording any kind of presentation. Those of us who support the service have taken the view that this was important in terms of increasing the Return On Investment, and it is an approach that we believe has been successful.

ReVIEW has been used to capture diverse non-academic sessions including:

  • Conferences
  • Departmental meetings
  • Launch events
  • Presentations by senior management
  • Inductions
  • Retirement advice for staff
  • Health and safety training
  • Staff development workshops
  • Language / presentation skills support for non-native speaker lecturers
  • Procurement tender presentations
  • Pre-arrival induction for overseas students
  • Careers advice

Screenshot from CEC presentation on ReVIEW

In terms of the diversity of academic captures, this too is increasing, and over the last year we have seen the three variants of ReVIEW / Echo 360 used to record student presentations, feedback to students, ‘flipped’ content, etc.

5)IPR Issues

IPR issues are frequently cited as a particular problem of lecture capture, and as an impediment to scaling up a lecture capture service.

With planning, this need not be the case, for a number of reasons. Firstly, infringement of third-party copyright is not just a problem with lecture capture; it applies to other aspects of teaching and learning, and in fact in the last two months the University has been served with two copyright infringement notices relating to online teaching resources. If staff follow the advice that is provided by the Library, the Teaching Centre and others regarding copyright (in particular, sourcing and using media legitimately), this can easily be avoided. One example of this: the University subscribes to the BoB (Box of Broadcasts) service which makes it easy to find and use TV programmes in the classroom without fear of infringing copyright, and this licence also covers lectures which are captured on ReVIEW.

It is true that students sitting at the front of a lecture theatre might, if they ask a question, find that their voice is audible on the ReVIEW recording. This is rarely going to lead to a complaint, but lecturers can avoid this becoming a problem by making it clear to students at the beginning of the semester / beginning of the lecture that lectures are being recorded. If necessary, ReVIEW captures can be edited to remove short clips. This has not happened once since ReVIEW was introduced.

Potentially more problematic is the question of ownership of copyright in the captured lecture, and the performance rights of the lecturer. There is currently some uncertainty over the copyright clause in the Academic Conditions of Service and it would be helpful for this to be resolved.

6)Benefits of lecture capture

The benefits depend in part on the way that lectures are captured and on the usability of the lecture capture system. If lectures are recorded ‘manually’, with the cameraman panning from the presenter to the projector, and with the end result put online as a single video sequence, this is not as usable as it might be for the student: it’s difficult to read what was on the projector, and it takes time to find a particular section in the recording.

By default, REVIEW captures the audio recording, the video of the presenter, and what was presented on screen as separate streams, only synchronising them at playback, with a ‘thumbnail’ index of the presentation created automatically which allows the student to navigate instantly to the required section of the lecture. This makes the system highly usable and is one of the reasons why students have been overwhelmingly positive about it (see below).

Lectures captured using a system such as ReVIEW / Echo 360 are, or might be, of benefit to:

  • distance learners
  • elite athlete students away training or competing
  • disabled students
  • students whose first language is not English
  • students whoare obliged to take on part-time jobs and are unable to attend every lecture in person
  • postgraduate students already in employment
  • students on modules that have in the past proven to be particularly challenging
  • all students at revision time
  • students on modules where the lecturer is a non-native speaker of English
  • academics wishing to rethink how they use contact time more efficiently and effectively (the ‘flipped classroom’ approach)
  • academics wishing to reuse specific lectures from another module / programme / school as preparatory / supplementary material
  • reducing the disruption caused by a major incident on campus (epidemic; snow; etc)
  • facilitating peer observation

7)Feedback from students

‘I think lecture capture is a really useful tool and I have felt the benefits. In the modules that used lecture capture I noticed a difference in how myself and my peers experienced a lecture. I felt I could concentrate and absorb a lot more rather than worrying about making sure everything was noted. After the lecture I would then go to the online recordings and watch the key points not only for revision but to help me understand some of the extra reading too.’ Samantha Davis, Teaching Centre Intern 2013/14, who experienced ReVIEW as a PHIR student.

Students have been overwhelmingly positive about ReVIEW, especially when they have experienced it directly. The response has been even more positive where students have had experience of an older generation video recording system (the MSc REST programme in SEESE), where lecture viewing figures more than doubled from one year to the next, and focus group feedback showed that students appreciated the much improved quality and usability.

8)Feedback from staff

Feedback from staff who have used the system has also been overwhelmingly positive. Very few staff have used the system and decided that they will not use it again. Anecdotally, many staff have told me that they were anxious about using ReVIEW for the first time but soon realised that there was little to worry about and that it did not increase their workload.

Nevertheless, fear of the new / unknown is a barrier to further take-up, and to help counter this I have had agreement from 10 academic members of staff who have used ReVIEW, including senior colleagues, to act as lecture capture ‘mentors’. The mentors are: Dr Marcus Collins (PHIR); Dr Crispin Coombs (SBE); Dr Luke Garrod (SBE); Prof George Havenith (Design School); Prof Jon Huntley (Wolfson); Dr Brian Jarvis (Arts, English and Drama); Dr Carol Robinson (MEC); Prof Liz Stokoe (Social Sciences); Martin White (AACME); Dr Sheryl Williams (EESE).

9)Use by elite athletes

The use of lecture capture has already been piloted in a limited way to support elite athlete studentswhile away at training camps / competitions; for instance, the 2012 Olympic field hockey bronze medal winner Laura Unsworth had lectures on two modules captured in semester 2 in 2013 specifically because she was going to be away at a national squad training camp. This semester, Giselle Ansley and David Condon are having lectures captured for similar reasons. With over 500 elite athlete students across multiple sports currently studying at Loughborough,there are however many more students who might benefit from being supported this way.

10)Lecture capture and attendance

As the use of lecture capture increases internationally, the research base is also rapidly expanding, with many researchers specifically interested in the relationship between the availability of captured lectures with attendance. The perception that roll-out of lecture capture will inevitably lead to declining attendance is one of the main barriers in many institutions.

ArunKarnad(2013) at the LSE has compiled a report summarising the findings of recent lecture capture research relating to this question which can be viewed here:

With regard to attendance, he concludes that “the complexity of student behaviour using recorded lectures […] makes it difficult to link access to recorded lectures and attendance”.

Karnad, Arun (2013)Student use of recorded lectures: a report reviewing recent research into the use of lecture capture technology in higher education, and its impact on teaching methods and attendance. London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

Since the ReVIEW service began in October 2009, there has only been one anecdotal report of a possible connection between the introduction of lecture capture to a module and a drop in attendance (this Semester, in SBE).

11)Loughborough lecture capture conference July 13

The Teaching Centre held its first annual lecture capture conference in the Keith Green Building on July 3rd 2013. Many of the sessions were kindly written up by David Hopkins from Leicester University; his report can be read here: .

The first keynote presentation, by Steve Rowett of UCL, can be viewed here: .

The main theme to emerge from the day was that increased usage of lecture capture, to the extent that it will become commonplace, is inevitable, replicating the evolution in usage of the VLE. There was also an acknowdgement, among an audience that was generally enthusiastic about the benefits of lecture capture, that some colleagues are fearful of the technology and will need both understanding and encouragement.

12) Archiving and re-use

We do not currently have any explicit policy on archiving or re-use of captured lectures or other content. As use of ReVIEW scales up significantly, this will need to be addressed, if only because storage is not infinitely available. (That said, to put this into context, the University CCTV system currently uses over 1000 times more space for the video recordings it generates.)

With regard to re-use: some institutions, such as Newcastle, have a clear policy of forbidding any use of captured lecture content outside the cohort to which the lecture was originally delivered. However, introducing such a policy here would perhaps be unnecessarily heavy-handed, preventing re-use of materials that benefit students.

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