Abstract:

The concept of Lightboard was first developed by Michael Peshkin of Northwestern University, who after watching films of traditional chalkboard lectures decided that there must be a better way to deliver blended learning. He created a glass board that could be written on and filmed through. The lecturer faces towards the viewer and their writing and overlaid slides appear in front of them. This setup allows instructors to illustrate lessons with a diagram or explain a formula without blocking the written content with their bodies and without turning their backs to their students. A PowerPoint image can be merged to appear in the video as if it has been projected onto the writing surface.

We first got involved in April 2016 when we were asked to build a Lightboard for remote teaching activities at Swansea Council’s child social services department. They needed to develop engaging training videos which could be delivered flexibly online or to remote sites, to allow child social workers in Swansea to remain in the field for longer. They surveyed all available technologies and decided Lightboard was the best choice. The only problem: you can’t buy Lightboards in the UK – you have to make them.

We put together a team who transformed their request in to a student-driven group project over the summer of 2016. In what would become the first phase of a longer project, our students successfully delivered the working Lightboard to Swansea Council’s child social work department. Realising how beneficial the same technology could be to our teaching we developed phase 2 – another student project over the summer of 2017 to build a Lightboard pop-up studio for us. After testing and demonstrating the technology, and growing and proving our team, we were granted funding for stage 3 - our own dedicated Lightboard studio.

Three years after Swansea Council approached us our team has successfully delivered multiple student-lead design projects, built technology now in use by Swansea social services, built our own facility which has been adopted University-wide for blended learning, been invited to give key University lectures on teaching and influenced change of practice across our University and beyond.

The paper describes our journey from disseminating the technology, gathering funds, engaging lectures to develop videos to capturing the students’ feedback.

Keywords:

Technology enhanced learning, video clips, blended learning, inclusivity and equality.