Lecture capture update

I attended a very timely lecture capture event yesterday organised by my ex-colleague Juliet Hinrichsen at Coventry in support of their JISC ELTAC project. The focus of the event, attended by representatives of some of the institutions that have really scaled up their use of automated lecture capture (LSE, Newcastle, Birmingham), was on staff development issues around lecture capture and on evaluation.

I say ‘timely’ because as the take-up of lecture capture at Loughborough starts to increase (and we now have users across all three Faculties), there is a need to start providing more formal staff development opportunities rather than the ad-hoc support which has until now been sufficient.

Delegates at yesterday’s event talked through many of the concerns and preconceptions that academics (and senior managers!) may have around the use of lecture capture, particularly the notion that the availability of captured lectures online will have a negative impact on attendance. While this does not seem to be happening, that is not to dismiss the concern, and we need to look at ways of embedding lecture capture that do not promote passive consumption by students.

On the basis of yesterday’s workshop, and interviews conducted with academics across many institutions (including here), the project will soon be publishing a range of lecture capture staff development resources which we will certainly be using.

We now have two ‘fixed’ Echo 360 lecture capture installations, in CC011 and T003, and this will increase to 5 over the next couple of months. In addition, we have just bought a 5-user Echo ‘personal capture’ licence, which allows us to offer lecture capture in pretty much any teaching room on campus, so if you are interested in trying it out, there is no longer the obstacle of needing to be allocated one of the two large lecture theatres.

Any requests for sessions of any kind to be captured should be directed to Aaron Turlington-Smith in Teaching Support, at:   a.smith2 [at] lboro.ac.uk .