During the Covid-19 pandemic, the increased use of synchronous online lecture recording and pre-recorded lectures in higher education (HE) worldwide is unprecedented as an emergency response. Nevertheless, prior to the pandemic, the application of the lecture recording (LR) technology was already considered to be developing into standard practice in HE (Draper et al., 2018) and presented as one of a range of technological solutions to inclusion (Jisc, 2018). Previous research mainly investigated LR’s impact on specific indicators for outcomes such as attendance and attainments (e.g. Edwards and Clinton, 2019; Johnson, Massa and Burne, 2013), while a number of studies also recognised that LR was found by certain groups of HE students, who would have traditionally been marginalised and excluded given the structural barriers of access against those with diverse backgrounds, to be helpful for their learning (e.g. Nightingale et al., 2019). However, there is very little critical and in-depth examination of the role of LR in facilitating inclusive education in the context of HE by engaging some of the complexity of social, technological and educational change, beyond instrumentalist assumptions of ‘technology-enhanced learning’ (Bayne, 2015).

The project discussed in this paper, ‘Lecture Recording for Inclusive Education’, was conducted prior to the pandemic over the academic year 2018/19 at a Russel Group international research-intensive university in the UK, at a time when the institution was undertaking an ambitious plan to upgrade its technology infrastructure and universalise LR across departments. The research questions of the project were set out as below:

1. How do university students understand the role of LR in supporting inclusive education?

2. How do teaching staff perceive LR and utilise it to enable inclusive teaching practice?

3. To what extent can LR effectively support inclusive teaching and learning in HE?

The project adopted a qualitative approach to capture rich and diverse views of the participants. While both groups of students and staff were involved in the project, this paper particularly surfaces voices of students, who have been internationally much less represented in the implementation of and research on LR, by positioning them as crucial partners in co-creating education (Cook-Sather, 2014; Sutherland, Lenihan-Ikin and Rushforth, 2019). The discussion of this paper is to contest the notion of LR as a straightforward ‘solution’ to inclusion in HE, and develop critical perspectives of the relationships between technology and inclusive education.

Recognising students’ intersectional experiences of barriers to inclusion (Bešić, 2020), the project did not limit participants to particular prescribed categories while approaching a balanced representation of varied backgrounds. Purposive sampling was used considering diversity in year of study, gender, dis/ability, race, language, culture and socioeconomic status. As the project progressed, interest to participation continued to be expressed by a larger amount of students that exceeded the intended scale of the study, thus a more emergent theoretical sampling strategy was later adopted to enhance the sample’s heterogeneity to recruit those who offered new insights till when data saturation was reached (Saunders et al., 2018; Strauss, 1987). The participants were provided with informed consent letters which explained the rationale of the research, the expectations, confidentiality and anonymity, and their rights to withdraw at any time. Students were given book tokens to compensate their time incurred due to participation. The project involved 15 undergraduate and postgraduate students with diverse backgrounds and 10 members of staff with teaching responsibilities. Semi-structured interview method was used to elicit responses on specific topics and meanwhile allow spontaneous, flexible and open-ended conversations (Cridland et al., 2015; Kallio et al., 2016). The interview guidelines were formulated to encourage participants’ reflections on issues related to inclusion (of themselves and peers) and accommodate a range of views, such as perceived benefits and drawbacks of the LR service and alternative options to LR in teaching provision to address inclusion. Being a female and international member of staff in the participating university who has experience of working with disabled students, the author built rapport and trust with the participants by listening with empathy and sharing her similar personal experience in terms of barriers to learning. The interviews with students lasted 30-45 minutes and the interviews with staff lasted about 1 hour. Both groups much welcomed the opportunity to be heard. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. The students and staff’s data were analysed separately using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006), involving both inductive and deductive processes to build interpretations from the participants’ perspectives while observing presumptions about the relationship between LR and inclusive education informed by previous studies. The consensus on the interpretation of the data was reached between the project’s researchers to add trustworthiness. The project did not intend to claim generalisation, acknowledging the unique social context and process that gave rise to the collected data.

The student participants recognised the life-changing opportunity to study in HE and consistently perceived traditional face-to-face lectures as crucial and motivating action to engage learning. However, many recalled challenging experiences with transition into HE’s depersonalised and exclusionary approaches to teaching. All student participants noted that learning could be interrupted due to a wide range of circumstances and the usefulness of LR in mediating some of these challenged was recognised. The social barriers faced by the participants conflict with a traditional rigid temporal and spatial structure of teaching in the university, giving rise to the acceptance of LR as a supplementary service to support learning. However meanwhile, the student participants emphasised the need of HE to prioritise quality education for all and engage with complex issues relating to publicity and democracy, and they further highlighted that LR should not be viewed as a complete replacement of lectures and the technology was more of a compromise solution when the desired alternative change in teaching could not be provided. The student participants’ views of LR were intertwined with their expectations towards and experiences of the purpose, organisation and environment of teaching and learning in the university, suggesting a view of the technology as deeply enmeshed and practically indistinguishable from the context in which it is employed. The use of LR to promote inclusion appears to align with a reductionist, tokenistic and technical approach by assimilating students into forcibly maintained exclusionary structures (Bacon and Pomponio, 2020). Students’ resistance towards such approach as learned through this study has affirmed the necessity to hear them. The paper highlights the convergence of needs for promoting student voice across research into inclusive education and educational technology to stimulate critically-informed approaches for transformative change.

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