Stephen MarquardTabisa Mayisela

University of Cape Town

Why do students use recorded lectures? The Opencast Summit: 

Open Source Lecture Capture & Video Management for Education25-27 March 2015

"UCT Upper Campus landscape view" by Adrian Frith , Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0

Opencast at UCTUCT is a mid-sized research-intensive residential university with about 25,000 students

Production service launched 2012

3286 recordings published in 2014

47 venues equippedfor automated capturein 2015

240 recordingsper week in 2015

Up to 2500 studentsuse recordings weekly

Users per 24 hours (green) and 7 days (blue), Mar 2014 – Mar 2015

Active streaming users over 5 min (green), of which on-campus users in blue

Capture hardware:

Galicaster Capture Agentfrom Teltek

Datapathcapture cards

Bosch, Axis and Vaddio IP Cameras

Logitech Webcams

Integration with Sakai VLE (Vula) using LTI

Matterhorn Engage Player (with download options available)

Why investigate?

Lecture recording project initiated in late 2009, prompted by:a. Increased DIY activity (risk of fragmented solutions)b. Informed assumptions about value to students (US surveys)

Helpful to understand teaching and learning value in more depth after several years of implementation:• Align development, operations and support efforts with student 

needs• Discussions with academics (encouraging opt-in, alleviating

fears, advice on appropriate use and advice to students)• Understand return on investment (even if unquantifiable) to

make appropriate case for continued investment and operational costs

1. Focus groups

• Emailed 500 most-active students (as defined by user tracking data) requesting participation in focus groups; offered a range of times and free pizza!

• Focus groups held in May 2014 with total of 18 students from across six courses

• Sessions recorded and transcribed• Data analysis - an inductive process that

draws on the grounded theory principles (Glaser & Strauss, 1967)

“If the lecturer’s going too fast through

something you don’t understand, you can

slow it down. So, you’re not forced to learn at the pace of

others; you can fly through what you find easy and concentrate

on what you find hard.”

(UCT student, May 2014)

The participants

What determines how often you use lecture recordings? 

• Preparing for a test• Complexity of the course (watch even if they had attended)• For revision (watch repetitively)• Didn’t understand something in class

“There are some things I don’t understand that I take note of in class … when I am studying, I watch that part of the video and then I understand”

• Missed the first ten to 15 minutes (class is at 8am; studying until late evening – miss 1st lecture)“I have to go over and recap whatever they did during that period”

• Catching up: * busy with work for another course (i.e. preparing for test or have assignments)* time-table clashes; some prefer going for tutorials

“I prefer going for tutorials than lectures, so will watch recordings in the evening to hear what the lecturer said in class”

* busy with extra-curricular activities* working during the day

• I don’t have to come to campus to attend one module in a day • Preference: “For me, I prefer sitting behind the computer, on my own, instead of

sitting in a lecture hall with almost 500 people, where the lecturer goes through the example before you’ve had enough time to work through it on your own”.

7 Themes

recordings enhanced their ability to understand difficult concepts by

enabling them to go through the material more slowly, with the opportunity

to practice and refer to notes, the textbook and supplementary sources:

“sometimes, if I didn’t understand something in class, I go back to the lecture recording,

just to make sure I get whatever the lecturer was trying to say.”

“In Course A, you don’t really write notes; it’s mainly about working out calculations but

when you actually need to understand what you’re doing with an equation, so that

everything makes sense, and it doesn’t always make sense in the beginning. So, it’s nice

to have that option of going back and actually seeing, okay, this was important, what he

said – it wasn’t just a random piece of information. I should actually write this down”.

recordings allowed students to compensate for difficult timetables (one student

reported back-to-back lectures and tutorials from 8am to 4pm with no lunch

break), and allowed students to focus on the material when they were best able 

to do so:

“For me, it’s frustrating to go to a lecture, zone out, miss, like… you know, just because your 

brain is tired and needs a break, you don’t comprehend everything you need to, you’re not at

your best absorption rate. It’s a waste of time for me to do that, go home and read through

the text book and try and put it together with my notes, when I can just watch the lecture 

once when I’m paying attention, when I can pay attention, when I’m not tired, and get

everything I need to from it.”

“Often, I might be taking notes  in  class and  I’ll  just miss  something, and, obviously, I’ll go 

back and listen to it again and it will make sense, so I’ll actually be able to write down notes”

recordings allowed students to learn at their own pace, rather than the pace

of the whole group”

“If he’s going too fast, I can just stop him, I can go at my pace. It’s all about our learning.

Like, you can’t learn at someone else’s pace, if it’s not your pace. ... So, if you want to slow

it down, it just makes life easier”.

“I spend roughly four hours to watch a two hour lecture because I’m stopping every few 

slides just to highlight and get those points down, do the examples.

Also, I find the examples are the way you learn the most. In class, the lecturers tend to rush

through it because the solution is on the next slide, so they read the scenario and then they

do the solution, whereas, if you’re watching the lecture recording, you see the scenario for

the first time, you pause, you do it yourself, and, then, when you press play, you can see 

what you’ve done wrong, where you’re going wrong. And that, for me, is more of a 

learning experience. So, that’s why I use lecture recordings a lot”.

recordings made lectures easier to follow:

“It’s also… it’s nice to hear the lecturer quite audible in your ears, like, especially when

they’re talking fast, you can go back and replay it at your own speed. I think that’s what’s the

nice thing about lecture recordings; it’s like the lecturer’s lecturing one on one.”

recordings allowed lectures to be more efficient for both students and

lecturers:

“And, like, the lecture’s so big, there’s, like, about 400 students there, so you don’t want to be

that one that’s always asking the questions, to ask the lecturer to repeat himself, repeat

himself. So if you can just go back to the video and then, like, have it, you know, played over

again and then pretty much have the lecturer repeat himself then you can pretty much just

go back to it and then you’ll be able to understand it.”

recordings allowed students to augment the lecture material

“You have to go back, you have to watch, you have to pause, you need to  compare with 

other material as well, to try to understand, and it’s very helpful, what he said, as well, with

trying to do something on your own, because sometimes there are time constraints in the

lecture, and they just have to get through it, and it just doesn’t show your understanding if

you’re just not trying to engage with the material yourself, prior to them showing you how

to do it”.

“We deal a lot with current affairs, where  lecturers  will  reference  a  case  that’s  in  the 

media, and, if you don’t know about it, it’s easy to press pause, go read about it, and, then,

whatever principles he’s applying to that case, you pick up without having to learn the

principles, go read the case, and then try and put the two together after the lecture. So,

there’s a lot of learning that happens in one, like, two hour space, for me, that normally

would’ve taken an entire day”.

2. Two first-year Accounting courses

Number of students viewing each lecture (Feb – May 2015, Jul – Oct 2015)

Number of lectures viewed by student

3. Student feedback poll• Feedback request emailed to 2869

students who had accessed lecture recordings during March 2015

• Responses were anonymous (also not controlled for duplicate responses)

• 267 responses from 18 Mar to 23 Mar 2015 (9.3%)

• Responses possibly skewed towards the particularly unhappy and happy (“silent middle”)

Dear student UCT would like your feedback on lecture recordings. Please take a few minutes to complete the lightning feedback form here: (Google Form Link) There are 3 questions, and it should take no more than 5 minutes to complete. Your feedback will help us improve and expand the service.

Relationship to lecture attendance

Strong agreement

Mixed response

Requested improvements

Top 3: Ability to see all blackboards, faster publication, audio quality

Conclusions

• Lecture recordings give students flexibility in how they make use of lectures as a learning resource, and thus enhance students’ learning experiences

• No single narrative: different students use recordings in different ways (also expected to vary with subject/discipline and teaching approaches)

• Lecture recordings more often supplement than replace lecture attendance

• Usage is regular and spread across the semester, and becomes more intense as the course progresses

• “It’s all about our learning”: lecture recordings are a student-centred technology