Recording student presentations using ReVIEW

Dr Dave Elder-Vass is a Lecturer in Sociology and a recent user of the ReVIEW automated lecture capture system. Here he describes his experiences and those of his students.

This semester I’ve been running a module for second and third year undergraduates in the social sciences called Debating Society. I say ‘running’ rather than ‘teaching’ because after the first couple of sessions the students have been doing virtually all the talking. Each week took the form of a debate between two teams of students on a controversial argument advanced in a prominent recent book.

As the students’ contributions to these debates were the prime focus of the assessment regime, I was concerned about how some provision could be made for reliability of marking. While I was doing the primary assessment on the basis of notes made in class, I was concerned about how to check my own recollections, about how my marks could be moderated by an internal moderator, and about how we could demonstrate the integrity of the process to our external examiner. The answer: record the students’ presentations. The e-Learning team and Teaching Support set it all up for me, and after that I only had to ‘top and tail’ the recordings so that only the student presentations were included.

Having done the first couple, though, I had a lightbulb moment: one of the most powerful ways for my students to learn how to present more effectively would be to look at these recordings themselves! A few clicks later, and the students could click on a link on LEARN and review their own performance. For anyone who has ever gone through this process, it’s a humbling experience: all those little faults you didn’t realise you had become glaringly apparent. And that, of course, is the first step towards correcting them. From student feedback, it’s clear that many of them have taken advantage of this opportunity, and indeed, from being an incidental opportunity, this has become the main use of these ReView recordings.