REC:all – How Students Interact with Recorded Lectures

I recently joined an interesting new online community of technology professionals and researchers called REC:all. REC:all is a European learning technology project funded by the EC Education and Culture – Lifelong Learning Programme. Its mission is “to explore new ways in which lecture capture can become more pedagogically valuable and engaging,” and it is “investigating a variety of learning design, technical and legal issues.”

On March 6 REC:all organized a webinar on a topic that has been of interest to us as we’ve tried to work through some questions about our DukeCapture-Panopto stats and see if we can get a better handle on student usage patterns. You can view the full webinar here.

Here are some interesting bits of information I came away with:

• Without a reason to view recordings (i.e., flipped class, assignment prep, etc.), students don’t watch them very much.
• Students who view online recordings do better than those who don’t, but more research is needed to quantify by how much
• Student viewing of recordings happens in peaks (i.e., before an assignment is due and especially before exams). This is borne out by data we have at Duke about views for our recordings
• Students over-estimate the amount of lectures they watch online. One study showed that 60% of students estimated they watched 75% of a lecture when log data revealed they only watched 25%
• Students who view lectures that have been “tagged” with key words or phrases that indexed navigation points in recordings did better than those who watched untagged lectures. The tags could be created either via students themselves or “experts”–it didn’t really matter that much. Interestingly, the speaker indicated they used MediaSite which doesn’t include the tags inside the player interface, and mentioned it would be interesting to re-try the experiment with Panopto, which does include this type of tagging inside the player interface.
• Students want all lectures to be recorded
• Quality (i.e., whether a lecture is perceived as “interesting” or “boring”) has little impact on whether students watch recordings or not

I’d love to hear back from any of our DukeCapture users who are engaged with questions around student viewing of recordings. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have insights or questions around that topic or any of the specific items mentioned here.