Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education includes an article that continues the debate on the potential merits and drawbacks of lecture recording.
The Lectures Are Recorded, So Why Go To Class? (Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2008)
The article points out that faculty reluctance about providing recorded lectures sometimes stems from anxiety about lower course attendance, even when they believe that student learning might benefit. At some institutions, lecture recording has become standard practice for many courses. This article describes a variety of strategies used to ensure that making recorded lectures available does not adversely impact attendance, including some which would be considered good education practice in any case, such as increasing the level of interactivity and offering in-class quizzes to assess student learning.
Ready to try lecture capture? If you’re a Duke faculty member interested in offering your students lecture recordings, there are a variety of options. You can contact a CIT Consultant in your area if you aren’t sure which option would best meet your needs.
– the DukeCapture service using Lectopia is available in many locations across campus
– the Duke Digital Initiative currently offers grants for some types of event recording and plans to offer more options in Fall 2008
Not sure whether lecture capture is a good idea for your course? Here are two other recent articles describing the lecture capture experience at Temple and Dartmouth.
Classroom Capture: Lecture Recording System Draws Devotees at Temple (Classroom Technology, Feb 2007)
Evaluation of the use of lecture recording at Temple found high satisfaction among both students and faculty and no evidence of a decrease in classroom attendance. Nearly all faculty who tried lecture recording decided to continue using it.
Capturing Course Lectures (The CREATE Project, Dartmouth Academic Technologies)
In addition to a brief summary article, you might want to view their three video profiles of faculty in humanities and sciences who describe benefits of lecture capture for their courses and their teaching.