Lecture capture: vital learning aid or a licence to skip class?

I would be concerned about students who would not have any structure to their work days, with no impetus to get out of bed in the morning, and lacking interaction and socializing with other students. Some might drown in their loneliness.

Another use of lecture capture is to provide the 'lecture experience' to distance learners, for whom the recorded lecture IS their lecture. Many of them, however, report that they do miss the 'personal' touch of actually attending, so we have found considerable success by recording 15-20 minute topic-sized lectures specifically for them (using a webcam & slideshow) rather than giving them the on-campus recordings. It may be that using similar recordings for the online support for on-campus students would be more effective... PS Could you please provide references for the papers you mention in the article, or at least sufficient information - like the names of the researchers - to be able to find them?

Just a passing mention of disabled students at the very end? Disabled students account for 12% of UK HE students and a huge number of them benefit from lecture capture - not just those with Specific Learning Difficulties (a more accurate phrase than 'Special Educational Needs'). Lecture capture is certainly no substitute for attendance but it can be an excellent enhancement for learning - and not just for disabled students.

Some teachers by their style regardless the content or subject reduce lectures to a sharp or slow torture for which many students are unwilling to endure. Lecture capture for them might be some form of rescue if. Subject for subject, an arresting pedagogical style will trump preference for lecture capture and leave the latter as supplementary addendum that it really should be. Having said this,there may be student/learner factors that make lecture capture the better option no matter the odds. Basil Jide fadipe.

Go on, I’ll stick my neck out and say that most recorded lectures are actually more useful than live lectures. I’ll qualify that by adding that I’m referring to purely didactic lectures - which most seem to be. Why would we want students to watch a monologue from the back of a lecture theatre when they can do it from home and replay the parts they have difficulty with? They can make notes at their own pace and take breaks when their attention lapses. Unless the live lecture requires live interaction then why insist students attend. I’d also point out that most didactic lectures in the first 2 years of a degree don’t change year on year. So why not scrap live didactic monologues - put them on line and update them if necessary. Perhaps students could use the saved travel time to read the literature and get a better understanding of their subject.

Agree to record all your lectures and then learn that your institution has asserted ownership of the copyright. Your services are no longer required.

Any change in learning and teaching methods are inextricably bound to resourcing questions. The evidence, and comments above, are clear that, for much of what students need to learn, there are much better ways than to sit in large groups taking notes (or not) for an hour or two, or to sit at home watching (or not) an unedited lecture that was presented to a near empty room. Methods such as creating carefully designed short video segments, integrating a mixture of online and offline activities with a mixture of organised group activities and individual consultations, are likely much better for most subject matter but all require different resourcing models. The change in resource required is both the amount of time that educators are allocated for different kinds of preparation and delivery and the types of skills needed to produce and deliver the material. For too many institutions, recording lectures is a very cheap way to appear to be helpful to students, when much better ways of helping students develop their intellectual capabilities (such as those noted in the comments) might be available. The choice is not between to lecture 'capture or not'. The real choice is between offering primarily campus-based learning with a range of carefully designed activities for that environment or offering primarily online learning with a different set of carefully designed activities. Shoehorning one mode of learning into a very different medium because it lowers student complaints and is cheap and managerially easy to deploy will fail. Institutions that take a much more holistic approach to selecting learning and teaching methods, and actively help their staff develop new sets of teaching skills, will serve their students better.

A lecture delivered live would be very different from a "studio recording" of the same lecture. The lecturer may chat to the audience, ask questions (some rhetorical) wander around the room, insert asides that only make sense if you're there, stop sentences mid-way to rephrase the thought better, and do a variety of other things that don't matter in live performance, but that sound awful in a recording. The idea of doing a rehearsed, scripted, 20 minute "studio recording" lecture as an adjunct to the live performance seems sensible to me. For me, the finest example of recorded lectures was Neil McGregor's "History of the World in a hundred objects" for Radio 4. Each episode was just fifteen minutes long, but packed in a great deal of information, albeit without pictures.

Stasi - vital citizenship aid or a licence to skip work ethics?

Many universities are expanding online programmes where 'live' teaching and learning is deemed unnecessary. It will be interesting to see how attainment compares with on-campus learning in future.

After recording all of his lectures in three different modules, a colleague teaching on a PTHP (part-time hourly paid) contract at a US university (where there is an increasing demand on staff to record their lectures) was informed that his contract will not be renewed -- although the module is still being delivered -- due to the university's assertion of ownership of his recorded lectures and the work of a grad student who is paid a pittance to mark submissions.