Students as partners in digital education: Exploring lecture capture in higher education through partnership between students and learning technologists

This case study reports on two student-staff partnership projects at Cardiff University that explored the student experience of using lecture capture technologies. We describe the background to these projects, how they were designed, and how students and staff worked together to gain insights into the student experience. The case study demonstrates that nuanced understandings regarding the way students use lecture recordings is required and argues that student-staff partnership is an effective way of achieving these understandings. Suggestions are offered regarding how educationists could further harness partnerships to explore the complex interplays between technology and student learning. This reflective account also explores our efforts in achieving meaningful partnership working, the challenges encountered, and highlights the benefits of partnerships between students and professional-services staff, specifically learning technologists.

Lecture capture, social topology, and the spatial and temporal arrangements of UK universities

This article considers how technologies actively shape the topologies of UK higher education. Using the example of lecture capture systems, we examine the relationship between learning technologies and formations of space and time. Combining theories of sociomateriality and social topology, and concepts of assemblage and relationality, we expose the entanglement of interests that influence university spaces and times. Across 3 months coinciding with the onset of COVID-19 we collected over 500 tweets that discussed lecture capture within UK higher education, leading towards 2 central arguments. First, the topology of the lecture is fluid, and, even while being radically technologised, re-spatialised and disrupted, it persists as a lecture and a central pedagogical feature of university life. Second, lecture capture is a rich site of ‘issuefication’, and viewing learning technologies as dynamic issues enables a better understanding of how their meaning, function and influence are contingent on shifting and relational assemblages of human and non-human interests. Lecture capture can be pedagogical, commercial and political, thereby resisting deterministic framings of the relationship between technologies and the temporal and spatial arrangements of higher education.

The Influence of Video Format on Engagement and Performance in Online Learning

Millions of students follow online classes which are delivered in video format. Several studies examine the impact of these video formats on engagement and learning using explicit measures and outline the need to also investigate the implicit cognitive and emotional states of online learners. Our study compared two video formats in terms of engagement (over time) and learning in a between-subject experiment. Engagement was operationalized using explicit and implicit neurophysiological measures. Twenty-six (26) subjects participated in the study and were randomly assigned to one of two conditions based on the video shown: infographic video or lecture capture. The infographic video showed animated graphics, images, and text. The lecture capture showed a professor, providing a lecture, filmed in a classroom setting. Results suggest that lecture capture triggers greater emotional engagement over a shorter period, whereas the infographic video maintains higher emotional and cognitive engagement over longer periods of time. Regarding student learning, the infographic video contributes to significantly improved performance in matters of difficult questions. Additionally, our results suggest a significant relationship between engagement and student performance. In general, the higher the engagement, the better the student performance, although, in the case of cognitive engagement, the link is quadratic (inverted U shaped).