Abstract:

Lectures for undergraduate biology students are often intensive in content and delivered to a large audience, which magnifies several common problems with lecture as a teaching method. For example, students are often too busy taking notes to pause and think, and those sitting in the back may not be able to see some details shown in a diagram in the lecturer’s presentation. This is why there are an increasing number of students who place their audio recording devices on the podium desk before their lecturer starts a lecture. However, with audio recordings, students find it difficult to associate a lecturer’s speech with the presentation slides used in the lecture accurately. To help students obtain high quality recordings of lectures that sync the lecturer’s voice and presentation material, two lecturers in our school use combinations of digital devices to record their own lectures for students. One lecturer uses a screen capture software and a Bluetooth headset to record his lectures live, and the other lecturer uses the same screen capture software but records his lectures in his office using a tablet PC and a stylus pen. Hence, the recordings are video files that provide the lecturers’ verbal lecturing and the accompanying Powerpoint slides synchronously. The videos are uploaded to the university’s stream server so that students can access them whenever and wherever they prefer at their own paces. This paper will discuss how students make use of such learning resources, their usefulness and potential issues with this pedagogical approach.

Keywords:

Lectures, Recording, Screen Capture, Bluetooth.