How Video Lecture Capture affects Student Engagement in a University Computer Programming Course: Attendance, Video Viewing Behaviours and Student Attitude

Author(s):

Aidan McGowan(presenting / submitting)Neil Anderson(presenting)Philip Hanna

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

16. ICT in Education and Training

Format:

Paper

Session Information

16 SES 14, The Impact of ICT

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-11

15:30-17:00

Room:

3005. [Main]

Chair:

Ed Smeets

Contribution

The use of video capture of lectures in Higher Education is not a recent occurrence with web based learning technologies including digital recording of live lectures becoming increasing commonly offered by universities throughout the world (Holliman and Scanlon, 2004). However in the past decade the increase in technical infrastructural provision including the availability of high speed broadband has increased the potential and use of videoed lecture capture. This had led to a variety of lecture capture formats including pod casting, live streaming or delayed broadcasting of whole or part of lectures.
Additionally in the past five years there has been a significant increase in the popularity of online learning, specifically via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) (Vardi, 2014). One of the key aspects of MOOCs is the simulated recording of lecture like activities. There has been and continues to be much debate on the consequences of the popularity of MOOCs, especially in relation to its potential uses within established University programmes. However there are also concerns that it may affect future enrolments in attendance based courses with Jordan reporting that “the average MOOC course is found to enrol around 43,000 students”, (Jordan 2014).
There have been a number of studies dedicated to the effects of videoing lectures.
The clustered areas of research in video lecture capture have the following main themes:

Staff perceptions including attendance, performance of students and staff workload
Reinforcement versus replacement of lectures
Improved flexibility of learning
Facilitating engaging and effective learning experiences
Student usage, perception and satisfaction
Facilitating students learning at their own pace

Most of the body of the research has concentrated on student and faculty perceptions, including academic achievement, student attendance and engagement (Johnston et al, 2012).
Generally the research has been positive in review of the benefits of lecture capture for both students and faculty. This perception coupled with technical infrastructure improvements and student demand may well mean that the use of video lecture capture will continue to increase in frequency in the next number of years in tertiary education. However there is a relatively limited amount of research in the effects of lecture capture specifically in the area of computer programming with Watkins 2007 being one of few studies . Video delivery of programming solutions is particularly useful for enabling a lecturer to illustrate the complex decision making processes and iterative nature of the actual code development process (Watkins et al 2007). As such research in this area would appear to be particularly appropriate to help inform debate and future decisions made by policy makers.

Research questions and objectives
The purpose of the research was to investigate how a series of lecture captures (in which the audio of lectures and video of on-screen projected content were recorded) impacted on the delivery and learning of a programme of study in an MSc Software Development course in Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. The MSc is conversion programme, intended to take graduates from non-computing primary degrees and upskill them in this area. The research specifically targeted the Java programming module within the course. It also analyses and reports on the empirical data from attendances and various video viewing statistics. In addition, qualitative data was collected from staff and student feedback to help contextualise the quantitative results.

Method

The study was conducted with a cohort of 85 post graduate students taking a compulsory module in Java programming in the first semester of a one year MSc in Software Development. A pre-course survey of students found that 58% preferred to have available videos of “key moments” of lectures rather than whole lectures. A large scale study carried out by Guo concluded that “shorter videos are much more engaging” (Guo 2013). Of concern was the potential for low audience retention for videos of whole lectures. The lecturers recorded snippets of the lecture directly before or after the actual physical delivery of the lecture, in a quiet environment and then upload the video directly to a closed YouTube channel. These snippets generally concentrated on significant parts of the theory followed by theory related coding demonstration activities and were faithful in replication of the face to face lecture. Generally each lecture was supported by two to three videos of durations ranging from 20 – 30 minutes. Attendance The MSc programme has several attendance based modules of which Java Programming was one element. In order to assess the consequence on attendance for the Programming module a control was established. The control used was a Database module which is taken by the same students and runs in the same semester. Access engagement The videos were hosted on a closed YouTube channel made available only to the students in the class. The channel had enabled analytics which reported on the following areas for all and for each individual video; views (hits), audience retention, viewing devices / operating systems used and minutes watched. Student attitudes Three surveys were taken in regard to investigating student attitudes towards the videoing of lectures. The first was before the start of the programming module, then at the mid-point and subsequently after the programme was complete. The questions in the first survey were targeted at eliciting student attitudes towards lecture capture before they had experienced it in the programme. The midpoint survey gathered data in relation to how the students were individually using the system up to that point. This included feedback on how many videos an individual had watched, viewing duration, primary reasons for watching and the result on attendance, in addition to probing for comments or suggestions. The final survey on course completion contained questions similar to the midpoint survey but in summative view of the whole video programme.

Expected Outcomes

The study confirmed findings of other such investigations illustrating that there is little or no effect on attendance at lectures. The use of the videos appears to help promote continual learning but they are particularly accessed by students at assessment periods. Students respond positively to the ability to access lectures digitally, as a means of reinforcing learning experiences rather than replacing them. Feedback from students was overwhelmingly positive indicating that the videos benefited their learning. Also there are significant benefits to part recording of lectures rather than recording whole lectures. The behaviour viewing trends analytics suggest that despite the increase in the popularity of online learning via MOOCs and the promotion of video learning on mobile devices in fact in this study the vast majority of students accessed the online videos at home on laptops or desktops However, in part, this is likely due to the nature of the taught subject, that being programming. The research involved prerecording the lecture in smaller timed units and then uploading for distribution to counteract existing quality issues with recording entire live lectures. However the advancement and consequential improvement in quality of in situ lecture capture equipment may well help negate the need to record elsewhere. The research has also highlighted an area of potentially very significant use for performance analysis and improvement that could have major implications for the quality of teaching. A study of the analytics of the viewings of the videos could well provide a quick response formative feedback mechanism for the lecturer. If a videoed lecture either recorded live or later is a true reflection of the face to face lecture an analysis of the viewing patterns for the video may well reveal trends that correspond with the live delivery.

References

Bennett, E., and Maniar, N., 2007. Are videoed lectures - effective teaching tool? Available at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.105.6020 Bunce, D. and Flens, A., 2010. How Long Can Students Pay Attention in Class? A Study of Student Attention Decline Using Clickers J. Chem. Educ., 2010, 87 (12), pp 1438–1443 DOI: 10.1021/ed100409p Publication Date (Web): October 22, 2010 Chang, S., 2007. Academic perceptions of the use of Lectopia: A university of Melbourne example. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/singapore07/procs/chang.pdf Cooke, M., Watson, B., Blacklock, E., Mansah, M., Howard, M., Johnston, A.N.B., Tower, M., Murfield, J., (2012). Lecture capture: first year student nurses’ experiences of a web-based lecture technology. Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing 29 (3), 14e21. Coursera. (2014). Coursera. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/ Davis S, Connolly A, Linfield E, Lecture capture (2009) Making the most of face-to-face learning. Engineering Education vol.4 issue 2 Holliman, R. and Scanlon, E., 2004. Mediating Science Learning Through Information and Communications Technology. RoutledgeFalmer, London, 301p. Guo, P,. 2013. Available at : https://www.edx.org/blog/optimal-video-length-student-engagement Johnston, A., Massa, H. and Burne, T., 2013. In Nurse Education in Practice. January 2013 13(1):40-47 Jordan, K., 2014. Initial trends in enrolment and completion of massive open online courses. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 15(1) pp. 133–160. Kim, J., Guo, P., Seaton, D., Mitros, P., Gajos, K., Miller R., 2014.Understanding In-Video Dropouts and Interaction Peaks in Online Lecture Videos. L@S '14 Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference Pages 31-40 ACM New York, NY, USA 2014 Krüger, M. and Nickolaus, R., 2005. Self-directed and cooperative learning with lecture recording. Available at http://stadium.open.ac.uk/prolearn/summer05/documents/marc_krueger_abstrakt_of_dissertation.pdf Le A., Joordens S., Chrysostomou S. and Grinnell R., 2010. Online lecture accessibility and its influence on performance in skills-based courses. Computers & Education 55 (2010) 313–319. May, G., 2013. The Great MOOC Experiment. Available at https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/09/10/essay-context-behind-mooc-experiments Nyamapfene, A., 2010. Does class attendance still matter? Engineering Education, volume 5, no.1 pp 64-74, 2010 Toppin, I., 2010. Video lecture capture (VLC) system: a comparison of student versus faculty perceptions. Education and Information Technologies, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 383–393. Vardi, M., 2014. Will MOOCs Destroy Academia? Commun ACM, 2012, 55, 11, 5-5, Association for Computing Machinery Watkins, A. Hufnagel, E., 2007. Video Vignettes: . Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education Volume 5

Author Information

Aidan McGowan (presenting / submitting)

Queens University Belfast

Computing

Belfast

Neil Anderson (presenting)

Queens University Belfast, United Kingdom

Philip Hanna