RECORDING LECTURES FREE

Metrics on how many students view these recordings may soon become part of a “big data” story – integrated with metrics of course evaluation and workload as a contested part of an academic’s personal development planning or a university’s audit. Suppose a lecturer was asked to speak at a conference but it awkwardly clashed with a lecturing commitment – it might be tempting to grab last year’s recording and simply re-cycle it.īut a recorded lecture may not always serve the lecturer so generously. Presentation, because lecturers may become more cautious about interactive formats: if students show uneasiness about being recorded taking part (or, indeed, demanding consent to be recorded doing so).Įducational technologists speak of “re-usable learning objects” – and recorded lectures could fall into this category. Content, because a recording is unforgiving in its permanence and vulnerable to uncontrolled circulation beyond its intended audience. Perhaps most worrying would be if lecturers start avoiding controversy and taking risks in both the content they use and their presentation. More controversially, lecturing may morph into performing: with modes of presentation that play up to the camera (or microphone).

Students using recordings will miss much of this, while lecturers may need to inhibit action to accommodate fixed cameras. Performance anxietyĪnother anxiety concerns the physical presence of the lecturer in front of his or her students: their gestures, movements, facial expressions, and eye contact. Such study habits are known to be unhelpful and so we can do without further temptations towards them. Similarly, ready access to replays may encourage procrastination and then episodes of “binge studying” around the time of examinations. This danger is that the lecture may increasingly be interpreted by students as being “the main thing”, prompting them to anxiously reproduce its contents in assignments. This could be counter-productive for staff wishing to stimulate a wide range of study practices. Man laptop via Rock and Wasp/Whether or not attendance is disrupted the organised recording of lectures by universities – versus the under-the-desk recording by students – risks putting too much importance on the lecture in the learning experience.

The potential downsides of lecture capture gather around three themes: changes to student experience, changes in teacher practices, and the re-shaping of institutional strategy. Meanwhile, lecturers can review students’ use of their presentations – perhaps noting sections that attract frequent re-visiting and so identify points where repair or elaboration might be useful.īut we have a responsibility to ensure that, on balance, any disturbance enriches rather than disrupts the vitality of the teaching and learning ecosystem. Those without English as their first language may be particular beneficiaries.

RECORDING LECTURES FREE

Recordings might free the student to fully engage at the live event while taking more measured notes on the second viewing. For instance, some lectures are challenging (or obscure) and so need to be heard more than once. The positives are pretty easy to imagine. Perhaps to inspire, perhaps to disrupt but, most likely, to create new dynamics with both positive and negative effects. A new technology such as the automatic recording of lectures does not just add something good to the learning context – it re-configures it, but in uncertain ways. Our universities are rich human ecosystems and, as such, they can prove fragile in the face of interventions. Yet lobbing new resources into complex settings deserves caution. Some onlookers expect a hesitant response from the higher education sector, which is often portrayed as cautious about taking up educational technologies. And the IT industry has created some seductive products to record lectures, a process also known as “lecture capture”. Universities across the world are considering whether to start automatically recording lectures.

Recording lectures