Smart phones driving lecture capture growth


Eighty-five percent of students say using lecture capture made studying 'somewhat or much more effective than normal.'

Viewing replays of a professor’s lecture anytime, anywhere on a smart phone has ballooned lecture capture use in higher education, as recent surveys show the technology remains popular on campus.

Watching and re-watching lectures online has long been among college students’ favorite educational technology, and making those recorded class sessions available via smart phone has led to a jump in lecture views, according to research from Tegrity, a leading maker of lecture-capture systems.

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The latest lecture-capture statistics come just a month after a national report showed that students are overwhelmingly satisfied with the technology.

Students’ use of Tegrity’s lecture-capture program jumped 47 percent in the first seven months of 2011, according to a company release. More than 1 million hours of professor lectures have been viewed since January.

Total student views of lecture videos increased by 38 percent in the past seven months, according to the Tegrity research, which credits the bump to web-capable smart phones that allow students to watch lectures anywhere, not just at their laptops.

Sandra Miller, director of instruction and research technology at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., said that since the school began using lecture capture technology in 2003, instructors have seen the video program “significantly increase depth of learning and result in greater satisfaction with our courses.”

Alan Greenberg, a senior analyst for Wainhouse Research, an independent market research firm, said colleges that have expanded access to lecture-capture technology are simply responding to burgeoning demand.

“My feeling is that the kids are screaming for it,” he said. “It’s a viral technology … because it helps students contextualize what they’ve learned.”

Lecture capture’s near ubiquity in higher education hasn’t come without skepticism.

Mark Smithers, an education-technology blogger who has worked at universities in Australia and the United Kingdom, said in a March blog post that lecture-capture systems might be “the single worst example of poor educational technology use in higher education.”

“The technology does nothing to engage the student who instead of sitting passively in a lecture theatre checking their text messages will now sit passively in front of a screen at home checking their text messages,” Smithers wrote.

College adoption of lecture capture will continue, Smithers wrote, but lecturers who advocate for the technology in every classroom on campus will remain “the exception and not the rule.”

“… [M]ost academics, although they may be good educators, are poor presenters in the lecture theatre,” he continued. “Traditional lectures aren’t designed for online delivery. They’re too long. Their length is designed to fit in with the timetabling constraints of the buildings in which lectures take place, not for any pedagogical reason.”

Being able to skip through large chunks of a recorded lecture and focus on a few main points made in an hour-long class period has made the technology a much-requested part of college courses.

Eighty-five percent of students said in a June survey that using lecture capture made studying for tests and quizzes “somewhat or much more effective than normal,” according to a white paper released by Wainhouse Research.

Three-quarters of student respondents said lecture capture “significantly or somewhat improved their grade” in a course that used the technology.

Greenberg said faculty criticism of lecture capture wouldn’t deter campus technologists from adopting lecture-recording systems and making the video available in most — if not all — classrooms.

“Like any technology, there is faculty resistance, but that resistance crumbles over time once they see the benefits,” Greenberg said.

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