Should Lecture Captures be Re-purposed for Online Students?

I’m currently working on a project with Kate Symons (@katesymons2) and others in the Centre for African Studies at the University of Edinburgh. We are interested in the use of videos for online students, and particularly in whether it is possible or even desirable to re-purpose lecture captures (i.e video and audio from on-campus classes) in some form for online students. The question came about due to a situation that is increasingly common - an MSc that has both an on-campus instance and a purely online version. Given that this material is recorded anyway, is there any value in re-using it somehow for online students?

In order to answer this question I have been interviewing students on the online MSc in International Development and staff (lecturers and learning technologists) who teach online courses (across the University) for their views. In this blog I want to explore some of the themes which arose in the student interviews – this is not a formal analysis at this stage, but rather my thoughts on the ideas which came up in the discussions. Thoughts, comments and directions for further reading are welcome.

From Dotpolka on Flikr, CC BY-NC 2.0

My first observation was that many of the students were enthusiastic about the idea of watching lecture captures as part of their online course. I was surprised by this for a number of reasons, not least because I thought students would prefer videos that were made for them, rather than ones that were re-purposed from another context.

Three reasons for this were discussed by the students:

a) The style of the discourse in a lecture was felt to be more conducive to learning and easier to concentrate on compared to a purposely recorded video created by a lecturer talking directly to a camera which tended to have a more formal feel to it. Students also seemed to feel that a lecture was more ‘authentic’ academic discourse compared to a purpose made video.

b) Enhanced connectedness was experienced by students who liked the lecture captures. Students reported feeling more connected to the lecturer, to the campus and to the on-campus students. I think we should be careful with the conclusions we draw from this though. Feeling connected is important, as is a sense of presence and interacting deeply with peers. If these aspects are lacking from an online course it is likely that lecture capture videos can help to provide that, but it is not necessarily the ideal solution. As Ross and Sheail (2017) point out, online students may over-privilege the campus experience and as a result attribute any difficulties they experience in their course as being due to the mode of learning rather than other factors. From my own experience as an online student (on the MSc in e-learning, now digital education), it is possible to create a strong sense of community and connection to both peers and tutors – but it needs a carefully planned and creative approach.

c) Vicarious Interactivity – in a 2016 paper (Wood, Galloway, Donnelly, & Hardy, 2016) myself and colleagues coined the term ‘vicarious interactive’ to describe the experience of listening to questions to and from students in large lectures. We felt that such activities should be described differently to the activity of ‘passive’ listening to the lecturer as students were likely to ‘think along’ with the questions. In the present study the online students felt that listening to the on-campus students asking questions and hearing the discussion that resulted was one of the most valuable aspects of lecture capture videos. Interestingly they found it valuable even though they weren’t able to take part in the discussion themselves.

Many of the ideas raised here which I’d like to explore in more detail speak to the concepts expressed in the Manifesto for Teaching Online (2016) created by the Digital Education Research Group at Edinburgh . These include statements such as ‘Don’t succumb to campus envy: we are the campus’, ‘Contact works in multiple ways. Face-time is over-valued’ and ‘Place is differently, not less, important online’.

In all of this, and in the discussions with (most) staff and students there is an underlying assumption and expectation that videos must form part of online learning. Yet, my own experience of the MSc in Digital Education showed how successful a course can be without the use of video material. I feel that online courses should be ‘born digital’ - and not seek to simply replicate what is done in face to face teaching. While video can be useful for online learning it is important to be explicit aboutthe purposes of the video and how that fits into the pedagogical approach of the course. For example is it for creating connections, transmitting content, enthusing students, providing a roadmap? Do teachers and students agree on this for a given video? Are there other ways to do these things? 

So while lecture capture may seem popular with the online students I spoke to, that popularity may be highlighting deficits in the online course provision, rather than a real desire to watch the lectures that on-campus students experience.

These are initial thoughts – comments welcome!

Ross, J., & Sheail, P. (2017). The ‘campus imaginary’: online students’ experience of the masters dissertation at a distance. Teaching in Higher Education, 22(7), 839–854.

Wood, A. K., Galloway, R. K., Donnelly, R., & Hardy, J. (2016). Characterizing interactive engagement activities in a flipped introductory physics class. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(1), 010140.

Should Lecture Captures be Re-purposed for Online Students? by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.