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Leisure as a source of innovation in health care and wellbeing (recorded lecture)

Facilitating the use of recorded lectures: Analysing students' interactions to understand their navigational needs

PhD research into the use of recorded lectures by students and how we can facilitate effective use. 1. How do students use recorded lectures according to their self-report? 2. What actual usage of the recorded lectures can we derive from the data on the system, and does that match with what students report? 3. How can we facilitate the use of recorded lectures by students using expert tagging and tagging by the students themselves? Ever since the start of the information and communication technology (ICT) era, universities and educational institutions all over the world have strived to incorporate its use into their pallet of instructional methods. The use of video, be it in the form of television broadcasts, DVDs or as video over the internet, has long been one of the important manifestations of the search for attractive learning materials that can be used independent of time and place. The recording and broadcasting of lectures has been an important solution for distance education. But more and more, universities enhance parts of their courses aimed at on-campus students with online video components and lecture recordings. They do this to allow students to review lectures at their own pace and at a time and place of their choosing. With this increase in use, the main research questions for this PhD research became increasingly more relevant. The research was conducted at two of institutions in the higher education sector in the Netherland, Fontys University of Applied Sciences and the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). There is previous research into this question, but studies show various shortcomings, such as lack of focus, meaning that the uses, technology and user groups were combined in a way that made it difficult to apply the results to our own situation. To establish some common ground, the dissertation starts with a description of a framework that more accurately determines the context of the research. The use of recorded lectures by students at the two institutions was studied using a survey and semi-structured interviews. Then the data collected by the Lecture Capture System was taken and processed into a dataset that allowed us to analyse the actual usage of the recorded lectures by the students. That data was then triangulated with the data from the survey and the semi-structured interviews. We also looked at improving the navigational support of the use of recorded lectures by offering tags that could be used to directly access specific parts of the recorded lecture. We investigated both the use of expert tagging and of tags created by the students themselves.

Comparing student and expert-based tagging of recorded lectures

In this paper we analyse the way students tag recorded lectures. We compare their tagging strategy and the tags that they create with tagging done by an expert. We look at the quality of the tags students add, and we introduce a method of measuring how similar the tags are, using vector space modelling and cosine similarity. We show that the quality of tagging by students is high enough to be useful. We also show that there is no generic vocabulary gap between the expert and the students. Our study shows no statistically significant correlation between the tag similarity and the indicated interest in the course, the perceived importance of the course, the number of lectures attended, the indicated difficulty of the course, the number of recorded lectures viewed, the indicated ease of finding the needed parts of a recorded lecture, or the number of tags used by the student.

Analysing students' use of recorded lectures through methodological triangulation

Recorded lectures provide an integral recording of live lectures, enabling students to review those lecture at their own pace and whenever they want. Most research into the use of recorded lectures by students has been done by using surveys or interviews. Our research combines this data with data logged by the recording system. We will present the two data collections and cover areas where the data can be triangulated to increase the credibility of the results or to question the student responses. The results of the triangulation show its value, in that it identifies discrepancies in the students' responses in particular where it concerns their perceptions of the amount of use of the recorded lectures. It also shows that we lack data for a number of other areas. We will still need surveys and interviews to get a complete picture.

Does tagging improve the navigation of recorded lectures by students?

Students more and more have access to online recordings of the lectures they attend at universities. The volume and length of these recorded lectures however make them difficult to navigate. Research shows that students primarily watch the recorded lectures while preparing for their exams. They do watch the full recorded lectures, but review only the parts that are relevant to them. While doing so, they often lack the required mechanisms to locate efficiently those parts of the recorded lecture that they want to view. In this paper, we describe an experiment where expert tagging is used as a means to facilitate the students' search. In the experiment, 255 students had the option to use tags to navigate 18 recorded lectures. We used the data tracked by the lecture capture system to analyze the use of the tags by the students. We compared these data to studentswho did not use the tagging interface (TI). Results showthat the use of the TI increases in time. Students use the TI more actively over timewhile reducing the amount of video that they view. The experiment also shows that students who use the TI score higher grades when compared with students who use the regular interface.

Students and recorded lecture

Online recordings of lectures provide students with anytime-anyplace access to lectures. Research shows that students prefer courses accompanied by online recordings and an increasing number of universities provide recorded lectures. This paper presents the results of a study into the use of recorded lectures at two universities in the Netherlands. The goal of the study is to gain a better understanding of the way that this group of students use recorded lectures. This understanding will enable the creation of usage scenarios that need to be supported. Our results show that students use recorded lectures as a replacement for missed lectures and for study tasks, like preparing for an exam. A large proportion of the students report that they watch 75100% of a recorded lecture when the view one. The fact that students did not mention the quality of the actual lectures appears not to influence the use of the recorded lectures. Recorded lectures for courses that only use the blackboard are viewed less often. There are also interesting differences in the use of recorded lectures of the different groups of students at the two universities. To increase the credibility and validity of the results, we need a more direct way to measure the use of recorded lectures by students. Methodological triangulation using the log data for the recorded lectures can provide this.