Informatics news
University Teaching Fellowship funds research into supporting student learning
By: Laura Tovey
Last updated: Friday, 17 February 2012
Dr Paul Newbury giving a lecture captured in the Informatics Media Technology Lab studios
Many Universities capture lectures using audio/video recording with off-the-shelf systems, such as Echo360, Panopto, etc. Sussex itself uses both audio recording and Echo360, with automatic upload to its VLE.
However, the capture of standard lecture material with these systems can have very variable results in terms of student engagement, i.e. the number of times students access the recorded resource and their feedback on the value of the recorded material.
Dr Paul Newbury was the 2011 recipient of a University of Sussex Teaching Fellowship, worth £5000, in recognition of his outstanding teaching and innovative use of multimedia resources. He is using the money to fund a pilot study investigating student engagement with lecture material captured in four different formats: enhanced audio podcast (slides and audio), Echo360 (slides, audio and webcam quality video), virtual camera recording (Slides, audio and SD video) and full studio capture (HD quality TV production).
An initial investigation, carried out in collaboration with Dr Phil Watten, has compared enhanced audio podcasts (slides and audio only) with full television studio-based lecture recording from the Informatics Media Technology Lab studios. The results show significant differences in student engagement between the two formats. Students were really enthusiastic about the capturing of lectures and made extensive use of the recorded resources, particularly those containing video.
Paul is currently running more extensive experiments with the four different formats, and intends to publish the results in a pedagogical journal and use the insights gained to improve lecture capture at Sussex.