During the 2012-2013 school year, Jeremy and Tara have been piloting the new lecture capture system installed in two of the rooms in the Loyola Science Center. The pilot is intended to explore the technology and decide whether a larger-scale implementation is appropriate for our campus. Many schools have campus-wide lecture capture programs, and can be used on the small scale or the large scale. For example, MIT’s Open Courseware uses campus lecture capture to allow students to watch videos of professors in the classroom. The implementation we have on campus can be used to capture the experience of a single classroom, but it can also be used to record videos outside of class as extra-curricular materials or homework to watch. Jeremy wrote a short piece for the CTLE Newsletter, Reflections, about the technology and classroom uses, and can be found here.

From a pedagogy perspective, I’ve found having the recorded videos posted for the students to view outside of class to be useful. It has removed the need to answer the perpetual question of “I missed class… what did we cover?” The students can just watch the video afterwards. The problem is, though: They don’t. It’s not that the videos never accessed, but students don’t often seem to actually spend the time watching the videos during the semester. I have the Angel links set up to track the users activity in folders where I post the links to the videos, so I can see who accesses what and when. There was a flurry of activity right before the tests, but only from about 10-20% of the class. So clearly not many of the students watch the videos. I’ve asked for feedback from the students about how to use the videos more effectively, and I’ll receive that at the end of the semester. Since Spring 2013 is the first semester that the lecture capture system has been working fully and correctly, hopefully we’ll be able to move from testing the functionality to testing the pedagogy.