There are several topics that I’d like to discuss as time permits–lecture capture, blended learning and m-learning. I’ll start with lecture capture because I have just completed a study of large undergraduate courses that do this and the topic is very much on my mind.

By lecture capture I refer to a trend that is sweeping campuses of recording audio/video and PowerPoint slides when faculty give their regular face-to-face lectures and making them available afterwards to students. Typically, the lecture is
distributed to students via course websites, YouTube, and/or iTunesU.

The rationales offered for doing lecture capture are varied and include: freeing up students to focus on the lecture rather than on note taking; allowing students to replay parts of the lecture that they did not understand; giving students the opportunity to catch up with lectures that they miss; and a belief that students will be generally more engaged and learn better. On the other hand, some faculty fear that, when lectures are captured, students will not attend class and/or that they will lose control of their lecture content because it can be easily re-distributed by students.

One very interesting result of my study (N=439) was that 43% said availability of lecture capture didn’t affect their attendance, but the rest said they attended less often including 10% who reported that they stopped attending lectures entirely! Moreover, there was no significant relationship
found between grades and attendance. This raises some fascinating questions about university lectures.

Why do we continue to have lectures? Wouldn’t it be better to use e-learning for delivery of content? Do faculty need to worry if students do not come to class (some of the faculty in my study fretted over this)? Why is lecture capture growing in popularity? I would be interested in your
thoughts on these and any other related issues.

Hi Ron and everyone- yes lecture capture is popular in the UK and Australia too. It’s good, it’s handy but not not transformation is it?

I’m a newbie at this forum so i know I should have started a new thread but can’t see how.  Perrhaps someone will help me out? 

Innovations- what I’d like to report is this- that Universities change very slowly  (some not much at all..) with constant concern for quality learning and an evidence base. This frustrates early adopters and the more radical innnovators beyond belief and leads to many leaders burning out.  What I’m trying to do is accommodate all of this through a strategy that allows the more radical people to do their thing, whilst gradually changing the design of learning and everyone’s skills for the more careful (aren’t i polite?) majority.  Key question- is this the way to create fabulous learning futures through innovation?

Answers on a postcard….

Hi Gilly,no I don’t think you should start a new thread right now because our thread for this week’s discussion is Innovation in elearning.

Agreed
that lecture capture is not very transformational. But one thing for
sure about lecture capture is that students want it for a variety of
different reasons (afterall who would not want it?). At my own
university some are viewing it as a first step toward moving to either
blended learning (ie where there’s reduced seat time) or fully online
courses. Instructors can direct students to watch the presentation
recorded the previous year and use the face-to-face time for other more
suitable purposes such as discussions or problem solving sessions. Or if
they are satisfied with all of their recorded lectures from the
previous year, they might move to a fully online course using the
recordings as a major component. So what starts out as something not
very transformational may end up leading the way toward transformation. 

I understand your dilemma of trying to make change happen. But I suppose we have to accept that change is not going to happen overnight, so we need to encourage as many faculty as possible to take baby steps. Then we might get some of them taking even bigger leaps as they gain confidence!

Ron

Hi Ron and Gilly,

I’m happy to jump in here and share some of my thoughts about innovations in eLearning. Ron, I agree with your thoughts about the importance of focusing on using web-based technologies to “transform” our medieval learning paradigm, rather than enforce it. 

If we’re integrating “eLearning” into a brick and mortar classroom learning experience, faculty should try to harness the potential of their “medium” as effectively as possible. Podcasts or web-based moview/audio files (which is, essentially what a Lecture Capture is) are push-content.  When we’re teaching to the YouTube generation, we need to see that our students expect, rightfully, to be able to get “push” content from anywhere at anytime.  If they’re expected to come to a specific place at a specific time to have content “pushed” to them, where’s the relevance there?

Let’s use “push” technologies to deliver our lectures outside the classroom, empowering students to listen and learn mobilly from their iPods/smart phones or from a laptop/desktop.  And let’s also rethink what a “lecture” is.  Really, it’s “content” we are pushing out for students to review.  As we move forward into the domain of open education, what comprises this “content” will begin to shift.  In other words, must it always be content generated by a student’s professor?  Isn’t there tremendous learning potential in weaving in a presentation from another subject matter expert from YouTube or iTunes U?  Or scheduling a Skype interview with a subject matter expert from another part of the country/world and having students interview that person during class. 

I hope we can move forward with these types of “content” shifts so we can foster more participatory, active learning experiences in the face-to-face time we spend with our students.  Lecturing delivers low level learning (understanding, comprehending) and our 21st century students need to foster more higher level thinking skills (analyzing, critiquing, debating) to stay competitive professionally and to live successful personal as creative, independent thinkers. Those are the skills we should be fostering through our valuable face-to-face time with students.  Let’s pull them into the learning process, rather than shutting them out.

Cheers to changing our paradigms through eLearning.

Michelle Pacansky-Brock

Well said Michelle, fantastic aspirations, and of course we’ve all got examples of people doing just that.

But how?  What do we need to put in place, to do ourselves to enable others to do, to put sustainable effective innovations in place?

do tell us your ways? (and how not to?)

Gilly

Great comments, folks! On our campus of 56,000 students,
online, blended, and lecture capture modalities have allowed us to continue to
provide access to students in times of budget crises. While lecture capture has
appeared only in the past 2-3 years, online and blended instruction has been
offered since the mid-1990s. Some colleges have used lecture capture to more
effectively provide courses that previously were offered to our remote students
through interactive TV. Blended instruction allows the faculty to creatively
use the best of both worlds – both online and F2F, while also allowing our
administrators to more effectively utilize classroom space. On our campus,
blended courses replace a portion of F2F class time with online instruction.
Strategic departments have found that three of these blended courses can take
the place of one fully F2F course in terms of classroom utilization.

Students appreciate the flexibility these modalities allow,
and report that they can juggle work, life, and education because of this.
Increasing access, while maintaining quality is innovative!

Thereby posing the issues: As we delve into these modalities,
how do we continue to provide quality instruction to our students?  What
institutional support is needed, for not
only students, but the faculty who employ these technologies? Which
model best suits your campus, your discipline and/or your teaching
style?

I look forward to everyone’s suggestions!!

Folks, for those who have not seen it, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and New Media Consortium folks released their 2011 Horizon Report this week–  http://www.educause.edu/Resources/2011HorizonReport/223122 — detailing the six areas of emerging technology that they predict “will have significant impact on
higher education and creative expression over the next one to five
years.” 

One year or less to adoption:

Electronic BooksMobiles

2-3 yr adoption:

Augmented RealityGame-based Learning

4-5 yr adoption:

Gesture-based ComputingLearning Analytics

Anyone using these on their campus now?

Hi Michelle,

Great to meet you and to read about your ideas. I think you’ve just coined a new term for us to consider– “content shift.” The shift is from single source authority (the lecturer) to multiple source experts and student generated content. This really makes sense to me and it certainly is consistent with what the literature says about how people learn. E-learning doesn’t guarantee that content shift will happen but it opens up the possibility of it occuring in ways that are simply not possible in f2f only courses. Wouldn’t you agree?

Related to this, I would like to ask Patsy about what really happens in the f2f compent of UCF’s blended courses (if you can even generalize)? The basic principle, of course, is to use each mode to its best advantage. For example, the f2f classes are best for social interaction and the online component for content and more thoughtful discussion. But what are your colleagues doing in the f2f component? Are they just lecturing as always but a little less or are they doing some unique activies in class that you might like to share with us?

Ron

Ron – I’m so glad you are directing the focus toward the
importance of the instruction itself (as opposed to the mode/technology)!

Our university has significant administrative support for
blended and online courses. With that comes a rather rigorous faculty
development program and also an evaluation unit that studies the ongoing impact
of these new modalities on the student, faculty, and institution itself.

The required faculty development, focuses on encouraging
faculty not to merely put their course or its elements online, but rather to rethink the instruction itself. Faculty
are provided with ongoing instructional design, media production, and technical
support, thereby allowing them to focus on the instruction rather than being
constrained by the technology. Faculty who may have taught the same
face-to-face course have reported being rejuvenated in thinking about teaching
it a different way and they vary in their creative approaches to blending! The
focus is on students becoming active learners while increasing interaction in
the course. Maximizing success involves a planned and well-supported strategy
including necessary faculty and student support.

Patsy and everyone

e- book readers (also of course combined personal devices like ipods) are wonderful for university-owned materials. At present the publishers especially of lucrative text books are trying to tie them down. At Leicester I was involved in a wonderful project that found out how to do this technically and most importantly whether it added value to distance learning (it did).

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/projects/duckling/deliverables

scroll down see top two case studies (item 3) under e book readers

Gilly

Patsy, yes here too at the mixed-mode University of Southern Queensland  there’s considerable investment being put into the student learning experience through changing the vestors in various ways of what faculty and teams actually do to design and deliver learning. My bit is to constantly provide pointers to the innovation, not the easiest job in the world but the one I consider the most worthwhile in the 2nd decade of the 21st Century. If we can’t change the way we teach learners of all ages and disciplines- how can we expect them to solve the big issues of the 21st Century?  That was a rheretorical questions of course.

I’m doing that through adaptive incremental innovation as well as the more radical over the horizon type.

What do you think will be most important in 5 years?

best wishes Gilly

Gilly and Patsy, I just led the authoring of a major “business case” for eleaning at York University at the invitation of our Provost. We have never viewed online learning as a big priority. But now that we’re facing pressure to increase enrolment (we’re already at 50,000 students), online learning is seen as the way to grow without large capital expenditures. However, we recommended going to blended learning rather than fully online for the reasons both of you, especially Patsy, are familiar with. In fact, we have cited the UCF experience as evidence of its effectiveness. Unfortunately, our recommendations aren’t really being pursued and I think the push will still be for fully online.

So good question, Gilly, how can we ever change especially when evidence of effectiveness is ignored? In 5 years, I suggest we’ll be doing things pretty much the same as now. Yes, the technology will be different for many, but the traditional lecture will still dominate even if it is just moved online. I think the demand for change will have to come from students and that will get faculty more motivated to change.

Ron

Ron, yes, you are saying what I have heard from others–it’s not a matter of whether we should go to online or blended, because that is a given. It’s a question of how to maintain quality instruction in our required modalities. We have found that our fully online courses are growing faster than the blended modality. One possibility is for faculty to teach blended to get comfortable with the online aspect, then migrate to fully online. Of course, the ideal is to view these modalities as resources for improving instruction and design courses with that in mind rather than a mechanism for increasing student enrollment.  But, we have often experienced that the intersection of economy and education frequently appears to be on a slippery slope!

Hello Everyone – I am new to this site, but happy that I have found it. 

I agree with Ron that we have to start looking at freeing up the professors in class to do hands-on, interactive activities while the professor has them in class  and use the LMS system for posting of their lecture PowerPoints or Lecture capture.  I see lecture capture as a great tool in our school because we are an English Speaking university, but for the students, English is their second language.  Therefore, it gives them a chance to review the lecture as many times as they want to make sure they get the information.  Then they can always bring up questions in the F2F class.  May concern is like all of you — how do we change the attitudes and old fashion teaching methods.  Faculty are not trained teachers – they need to learn new methods of teaching (they were taught by the lecture method – so that is what they think if the correct way to teach) That is my predicament now. How do we change teaching styles? Also – how does one get faculty to agree to capture their lecture?  Change is always a tough road.