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2013 Conference

“What Did I Miss?” How Lecture Capture is Changing the Classroom

TIE10: Daniel Laird, SUNY Oswego

Thou shalt install lecture capture in every classroom of the greatest science building in the universe! This was the 11th commandment handed down from on high to Daniel Laird on SUNY Oswego. This is tough when there are so many choices: onsite or in the cloud? Manual vs automatic? Do you want your faculty to be able to control what they do in the classroom in terms of setup? Do you just want to set it and forget it? How well does it integrate with your LMS?

Dan did a two-year pilot with two products, involving faculty members and students in focus groups to determine what features they required in a lecture capture system. They eventually purchased Panopto; went into full use in the  Fall 2012. 42 classrooms enabled. They have seen a wide adoption rate across the curriculum. Student usage is on the rise. The classrooms are setup so that everything that is going to be recorded has to run through a dedicated PC. They have unlimited licenses on the Panopto recorder, so any faculty member can use it. One year into using Panopto, there are 23 faculty users. more than 10,000 views and 74 courses.

Dan went with a fairly manual process for producing lecture captures, and so far most faculty reaction has been positive. Faculty have to do a setup step, but so far they consider this a low-cost for a high-value service for students, and they appreciate being able to have some options in how they capture and present the lecture. Some faculty were worried about the recording being a permanent record of what they say, but they also like getting able to review their own teaching. And long gone are the days of, “I missed class yesterday, what did I miss?” conversations with students.

As for student usage, review sessions on the weekend have been quite popular. The service also allows on-demand access for students with medical procedures or athletic commitments. And students with cognitive disabilities able to review material at their own pace. Dan shared a note he received from a student thanking him for providing a service that basically was allowing her to succeed in her studies, and for a former networking guy and email server admin, receiving that kind of feedback from students was hugely gratifying.

How does it change thinking about teaching in the classroom? Lecture captures services support the notion of the “flipped” classroom, where students can lecture material at their own pace, and then using the classroom time to do something else more effectively. Online classes are starting to use it. The online MBA program is using it to capture student presentations from wherever they are in the world.

There are lots of metrics included in the system. You can see minute-by-minute if there are spikes in viewership. Are students viewing the same part of the video multiple times? Is that a signal that there is some concept they are not understanding?There was a huge viewership spike in the second week of May. Guess what happens the second week of May? FINALS!

Photo Credit: teddy-rised via Compfight cc

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