Archive for Lecture Capture

Student Feedback and Lecture Recordings

Posted in Cardiff, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on April 19, 2023 by telescoper

This afternoon we had a very interesting meeting about teaching in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University, involving teaching faculty and student representatives from each year of each of the courses we offer.

It was nice that most of the feedback gathered by the student reps from their peer groups was positive. For one thing, they really like the blackboard-based teaching we use to deliver most of our modules. Most of the negative comments, however, related directly to lack of resources.

A particular concern, expressed unanimously by all the student reps at the meeting, was the lack of lecture recordings. I don’t think I am alone among the teaching staff in the Department in saying that I wish we could offer lecture recordings as routine. Unfortunately, however, and much to my disappointment, the Senior Management at Maynooth University has discouraged lecture recording as a matter of policy and has not invested in the technology required to make this possible so it is not practicable anyway.

My two previous employers – the University of Sussex and Cardiff University – both had systems in place long before the Covid-19 pandemic and all lectures were recorded as standard . I blogged about this 8 years ago, in fact. In my view the benefits of lecture capture far outweigh the disadvantages, and we should incorporate recordings of lectures as part of our standard teaching provision, as a supplement to learning rather than to replace face-to-face sessions. Every student learns in a different way and we should therefore be doing as much as we possibly can to provide a diverse range of teaching resources so that each can find the combination that suits them best. Technology allows us to do this far better now than in the past.

Some really enjoy live in-person lecture sessions, especially the ability to interact with the lecturer and the shared experience with other students, but others don’t like them as much. Others have reasons (such as disability) for not being able to attend in-person lectures, so providing recordings can help them. Others still have difficulty attending all lectures because of a dratic shortage of student accommodation. Why not in any case provide recordings for everyone? That seems to me to be a more inclusive approach.

The problem with lecture capture in Maynooth is that we will need to improve the cameras and recording equipment in the large lecture rooms to make it possible for lectures with a significant mathematical content. The existing setups in teaching rooms do not easily allow the lecturer to record material on a whiteboard or blackboard. In Cardiff, for example, the larger rooms have more than one camera, usually one on the lectern and one on the screen or whiteboard (which has to be placed further away and therefore needs to be of higher resolution). In Maynooth we only have small podium cameras in the teaching rooms. In fact I have far better facilities in my study at home – provided at my own expense – than my employer is prepared to provide on campus.

My home teaching room

I’m baffled and frustrated by Maynooth’s decision in this matter, which is generating a great deal of negativity amongst faculty and students alike. I hope The Management can be persuaded to change its mind. Persisting with the current policy would send a clear message that teaching and learning are not valued at Maynooth. Maybe they just aren’t?

P.S. The single most common inquiry I have received about the new MSc course announced recently has been whether it is possible to take it remotely. Given our lack of recording facilities, regrettably the answer to this is “no”.

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Chalk and Talk

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , on October 22, 2021 by telescoper

Today is the last day of teaching ahead of next week’s mid-term break. As it happens I did two consecutive lectures from 11-1 today instead of the usual one from 12-1 because of a rearrangement necessitated by a staff absence. I don’t mind admitting that I’m looking forward to a bit of a pause during Study Week, before embarking on the remaining 7 teaching weeks of the Semester.

The room I give my 12-1 lecture in has a chalkboard but the one for the 11-12 slot only has a whiteboard. The downside of the whiteboard is that it is almost impossible to make a lecture recording because the contrast is too low. I was happy to move to the usual room for the second one, which isn’t great either but at least has a decent blackboard.

A still from one of last year’s Engineering Maths lectures from home…

I know people think I am very old fashioned in persistently using a chalkboard. They also find it quite amusing that I bought one especially so I could do lectures from home using it. It’s far easier to get a decent contrast than using a whiteboard and I find that standing up and walking around allows me to communicate more effectively, at a decent pace and with a reasonable amount of energy. Most importantly of all I think it’s important for the students to see a process unfolding.

It’s proving much more difficult to provide decent quality lecture recordings on campus than at home because of the lack of decent camera facilities, but I’m doing the best I can.

Anyway, I was pleased to find a recent article about why Mathematics professors at Stanford University still use chalkboards. I agree with everything in it and will continue to use chalk and talk as long as I can. The way things are going with Covid-19 I may even be using the one at home again before too long…

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Welcome to the First Year

Posted in Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on September 27, 2021 by telescoper

Well this morning I had my first lecture to the new first-year students on their first day of teaching at Maynooth University. It went fairly well, and my improvised attempts to record the lecture for the students were reasonably successful too.

When I started at about 11.05am I was a little disappointed that I only had around two-thirds of the number I expected, but I assumed that was that students had difficulty locating the venue, Physics Hall. Not unreasonably quite a few new students assume that this is in the Science Building on the North Campus where the Physics staff are based. In fact Physics Hall is on the much more scenic South Campus, which is quite a distance from the Science Building which usually means that some newbies arrive late as a result of going to the wrong venue.

Incidentally, here is a view of Physics Hall from the front taken in 2012 at a Mathematics Lecture by Tim Gowers. The hall hasn’t changed much since then!

I like this room because (a) it has good blackboards at the front and (b) although a reasonable size there is not a huge distance from the lecturer to the back of the audience so everyone can see and hear the lecturer, and can be heard by the lecturer if they ask something.

Anyway, the first lecture was very introductory so late students weren’t going to miss anything earth-shattering, and in any case I was recording it, so I started on time. After talking for over half an hour someone – a theoretical physics PhD student – came in to the hall and explained that about half the class had been standing outside thinking I hadn’t turned up because the door was closed. Why they didn’t try the handle and have a look inside I don’t know! When the latecomers had all filed in and found a seat I had roughly the number I had initially expected so all was well. I explained to them that they shouldn’t stand on ceremony next time.

It did occur to me that this year’s new students have a pretty good reason for not knowing where anything is on campus is that for many of them today is the first day they’ve ever been herein Maynooth. Open days last year were all virtual, for example. It must feel very strange to commit to a four-year degree at a University you’ve never even visited before, but that’s what this cohort of students have been forced to do.

One of the things I tend to do in the first lecture is to explain that I do like to have interaction in my lectures and it was nice to find that quite a few people did answer when I asked questions. Lectures are so dull if it’s just an old fart blathering on for 50 minutes. The capacity of Physics Hall is about 90, which is not huge, but interaction is possible in much bigger rooms if you work to create the right atmosphere.

Giving students the encouragement to get involved is also helpful to the lecturer, as students will then be more willing to point out errors on the blackboard (which, of course, I put in deliberately to see if they’re paying attention). After today I have a pretty good feeling about this new class and I’m looking forward to seeing them for Lecture 2 tomorrow.

Oh, and the instruction that masks are mandatory in lectures was observed impeccably by the students.

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What should universities keep after Covid?

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on May 7, 2021 by telescoper

On the last day of teaching for this academic year, with reasonably encouraging signs of some form of reopening of campus education being possible in September, it will shortly be time to think about how we proceed next academic year.

It seems obvious to me that although university staff have worked very hard over the last year the Covid-19 restrictions have meant that we have not been able to provide the level of education we would have liked and most of us are longing to get back to some form of face-to-face teaching. On the other hand, the restrictions imposed upon us have generated some new approaches and it would be silly just to abandon what we have learnt and go straight back to the way things were before the pandemic.

I have two main things in mind, one on teaching and one on assessment, both of them relating to my own discipline – theoretical physics – but hopefully of some wider interest.

Implementing the Lane-Emden equation as two coupled first-order ODEs.

First, on teaching. Over the past year we have mainly been delivering lectures and tutorials remotely, using a mixture of platforms (Zoom, Panopto, Microsoft Teams, etc). Most lecturers have done lectures as live webcasts as well as recording the sessions to be viewed later. I have used Panopto for most of mine, actually. I am actually looking forward to being able to dismantle the setup I have in my study for this, to reclaim a bit of space, but probably won’t do so until we know for sure what we’ll be doing next Semester!

(By the way does anyone know where I should send the bill to my employers for their use of my study over the last year?)

For the record, I have found about 50% of the registered students have watched the lectures as live broadcasts from my home; the rest watch the recordings offline.

Maynooth didn’t have any facilities for lecture capture on campus until September 2020, in contrast to my two previous employers – the University of Sussex and Cardiff University – who both had systems in place long before the pandemic. I blogged about this 8 years ago, in fact. In Cardiff they actually use Panopto; all lectures were recorded as standard. In my view the benefits of lecture capture far outweigh the disadvantages, and we should incorporate recordings of lectures as part of our standard teaching provision, as a supplement to learning rather than to replace face-to-face sessions.

It seems to me that much of the argument against providing lecture recordings is from older staff who thing the younger generations should learn exactly the same way they themselves did despite the reality that classroom teaching in schools is now utterly different from what my generation experienced.

My view is that every student learns in a different way and we should therefore be doing as much as we possibly can to provide a diverse range of teaching resources so that each can find the combination that suits them best. Technology allows us to do this far better now than in the past.

Some really enjoy live lecture sessions, but others don’t. Others have reasons (such as disability) for not being able to attend in-person lectures, so providing recordings can help them. But why not in that case provide recordings for everyone? That seems to me to be a more inclusive approach.

The problem with continuing lecture capture beyond September 2021 in Maynooth is that we will need to improve the cameras and recording equipment in the large lecture rooms to make this possible for lectures with a significant mathematical content, as the existing setups in teaching rooms do not easily allow the lecturer to record material on a whiteboard or blackboard. In Cardiff the larger rooms have more than one camera, usually one on the lectern and one on the screen or whiteboard (which has to be placed further away and therefore needs to be of higher resolution). In Maynooth we only have small podium cameras in the teaching rooms.

The next topic is assessment. Since we were forced to switch to online timed assessments last May we have been doing most of our assessments that way. The student is given an exam paper at the appointed time, which they do on their own, then scan and upload their answers online (in our case via Moodle).

This mode of assessment has its problem. One is the possibility that students can collude (as there are no invigilators). Another is that not all students have a home environment conducive to taking an examination, nor a decent internet connection.

We decided to implement these as truly “open book” exams in which students are free to consult their notes, textbooks and internet resources. That format means it is pointless to ask the students to regurgitate definitions or learn derivations by rote so we concentrate on problem-solving, testing the understanding and application of concepts. Although it makes it a little harder to construct the examination papers, I think this a good way of assessing ability and knowledge of physics. If we can go do exams back on campus I think we should retain this approach at least for advanced topics, providing supervised spaces on campus to prevent collusion.

There are doubtless many other innovations we have brought in over the last year that people feel strongly about (one way or the other). Feel free to share them through the comments!

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Teaching after Covid

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on January 26, 2021 by telescoper

I know it’s a Business lecture, but at least there is a periodic table on the wall to remind students of the time when Universities used to care about science.

Near the end of a planning meeting this morning I was asked to give my thoughts about any long-term impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on teaching and/or research. That also echoed a discussion I had with staff in the Department of Theoretical Physics on Teams a while ago, which touched on the same question.

My own view in general is that although we find ourselves constantly saying things like “When we get back to normal…” I think we have to accept that the pandemic is going to change many things irreversibly. We’re going to have to get used to new ways of working in both teaching and research. Some changes will be made to make financial savings owing to loss of income over however long the pandemic lasts, and some of those will no doubt be painful and sad. Others will be opportunities created by us learning how to do things differently and a number of these could be very positive, if we seize the initiative and make the most of them.

One specific thing in the latter category is that Maynooth University installed a system of lecture capture to help deliver teaching when access to campus was restricted (as it is now). The hardware and software installed is fairly basic and isn’t by any means perfect, but it has worked pretty well. The main problem is that the cameras that have been installed are very limited webcams and are not capable of capturing, e.g. a blackboard.

One thing I hope will happen in the long term is that we include lecture capture as a routine way of augment students’ learning. That will require additional investment in infrastructure, but I think it would be well worth it.

Some years ago I blogged about this at another institution, which had facilities allow lecturers to record videos of their own lectures which are then made available for students to view online.

This is of course very beneficial for students with special learning requirements, but in the spirit of inclusive teaching I think it’s good that all students can access such material. Some faculty are apparently a little nervous that having recordings of lectures available online would result in falling attendances at lectures, but in fact there is evidence that indicates precisely the opposite effect. Students find the recorded version adds quite a lot of value to the “live” event by allowing them to clarify things they might not have not noted down clearly. In my experience they rarely watch the whole video, instead focusing on things they didn’t get first time around. And if a few students decide that it’s good enough for them just to watch the video, then so what? That’s their choice. They are adults, after all.

I’ll add that I do feel we should still make the effort to return to doing live lectures in some form and not rely entirely on recordings. I think that what you can do in a lecture is fairly limited part of the overall educational package, but that’s not the same as saying that they should be scrapped. Many students do enjoy lectures and find them very helpful. I just think we should make the best of the available technology to offer as wide a range of teaching methods as possible. No two students are the same and no two students learn precisely the same way. Let us offer them a variety of resources and they can choose which serves them best.

Another important, but perhaps less tangible, aspect of this is that I think education is or should be a shared experience for students. Just having everyone sit in the same room “enjoying” the same teaching session is a great benefit compared with having them sit in their room watching things on a laptop screen. I think that’s one of the worst issues with remote teaching, and wish we had found better ways of dealing with that over the past year.

There is a benefit for the lecturer of having a live audience too, in that actually seeing the people you’re trying to teach helps you gauge how well you’re getting it across.

Anyway, I started a poll on lecture capture a while ago before the pandemic. Feel free to add your opinion. It will be interesting to see if opinions have changed!

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Back to the (Early) Universe

Posted in Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on January 24, 2017 by telescoper

After what seems like ages away from the lecture theatre, today I resuming teaching duties with the first session of my module on The Physics of the Early Universe; the link there gives Enzo Pascale as being in charge of the module, but he has left BrExit Britain for his native Italy so I’ve taken his place. I actually wrote the syllabus for this module about five years ago when I worked in Cardiff previously, and was scheduled to deliver it in 2013, but I left for Sussex before it started and never actually lectured it. It’s nice to be able to teach this material at long last – at least it’s stuff that I should know something about.

This lectures are attended by students on the 4th year of the integrated Masters programme (MPhys) and also on stand-alone MSc courses in Physics or Astrophysics. I have about 25 students enrolled, which is not bad for a specialist module.

In fact Enzo recommended the book I wrote with Francesco Lucchin when he taught the module, and I’m happy to use it as the main text. I won’t cover all the material in the book – there isn’t time, and some of the book is out of date (written in 2002) – but at least almost everything I do in the lectures has a counterpart in the book.

Chapter 3 of Coles \& Lucchin has a chapter that may prove particularly popular in this era of ‘Alternative Facts’:

cosmology

I did however resist the temptation to hire a group of people to sit at the front of my first lecture cheering and clapping wildly.

I’ve asked to have my lectures timetabled in two-hour chunks. That’s partly because I only work part-time and I wanted to be able to maximize the flexibility with which I can use the rest of the time by concentrating my teaching commitments. The other reason is that I like the extended format. I don’t talk continuously for the whole time, of course. That would be unbearable for me and for the students. We have a ten-minute break in the middle. However, the two-hour block allows a wider range of activities – lecturing, discussion and worked examples – which is harder to do in the usual (50-minute) slot without being excessively rushed. When I taught postgraduates at Queen Mary we used two-hour blocks, which worked out quite well. The only problem is that I’m now a lot older, and having finished my first double-lecture I think it’s fair to say I’m more than a little knackered.

Another innovation is the use of Cardiff’s new lecture-capture system (called Panopto), which allows the lecturer to record everything – powerpoint, data visualizer, whiteboard and live action – for posterity. I recorded this morning’s lecture in toto and at some point when I get a moment I’ll do a quick edit and put it on Learning Central for the students to view at their leisure. I’m not sure how useful my ramblings will prove to be, but it’s fun to try these things. It’s a significantly more sophisticated and flexible system than the one we used when I was at Sussex, and I’m also lucky to be in a nice, clean and recently refurbished lecture theatre…

Anyway, this gives me the excuse to refloat an old opinion poll about lecture capture. Such facilities are of course very beneficial for students with special learning requirements, but in the spirit of inclusive teaching I think it’s good that all students can access recorded lecture material. Some faculty are apparently a little nervous that having recordings of lectures available online would result in falling attendances at lectures, but in fact the available evidence indicates precisely the opposite effect. Students find the recorded version adds quite a lot of value to the “live” event by allowing them to clarify things they might not have not noted down clearly.

I like the idea of lecture capture a lot and am very happy to do it with my own lectures. It does seem to be the case however that some university staff are wary of this innovation, but opinion may be changing. Please let me know what you think via the poll:

If you don’t like the idea I’d welcome a comment explaining why. I’d also be interested in comments from colleagues in other institutions as to the extent to which lecture capture technology is used elsewhere..

 

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Lecture Capture

Posted in Education with tags , , , , on November 27, 2013 by telescoper

One of the things that I found out when I came to the University of Sussex in February this year is that it provides something that I think is a very good thing for both staff and students – facilities for lecture capture which are in all the main lecture theatres on campus. These facilities allow lecturers to record videos of their own lectures which are then made available for students to view online. This is of course very beneficial for students with special learning requirements, but in the spirit of inclusive teaching I think it’s good that all students can access such material. Some faculty were apparently a little nervous that having recordings of lectures available online would result in falling attendances at lectures, but in fact the evidence indicates precisely the opposite effect. Students find the recorded version adds quite a lot of value to the “live” event by allowing them to clarify things they might not have not noted down clearly.

Anyway, I like this idea a lot and am very keen to do it with my own lectures. It does seem to be the case however that some staff are wary of this innovation. I thought this might be an interesting issue to put to a public poll open to staff, students and interested others either at Sussex or elsewhere to gauge the general feeling about this:

If you don’t like the idea I’d welcome a comment explaining why. I’d also be interested in comments from colleagues in other institutions as to the extent to which lecture capture technology is used elsewhere.

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