Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented shift in how contents and learning activities had to be delivered in Higher Education. Due to the total lockdowns on the second part of the 2019/2020 academic year and the intermittent, partial lockdowns throughout the 2020/2021 one, traditional face-to-face teaching had to be replaced with online teaching activities.

Well before the pandemic, and unaware of the upcoming online teaching challenges that it would bring up, we, as a small group of teachers interested in video-teaching, had already developed a simplified in-classroom live lecture capture (LLC) method. Its screen-casting nature helped us to avoid the technical difficulties involved in the live recording of in-classroom annotations on physical boards, by replacing them with live on-screen annotations.

On the other hand, due to the pandemic lockdown, the School of Engineering of the University of Malaga made a considerable effort to provide the necessary video/audio hardware setup to facilitate teachers to video-cast the in-classroom performance. Finally, the Virtual Teaching Support Unit of the University of Malaga has also made an important effort to provide software solutions for video-casting as, for example, the integration of the Blackboard Collaborate system with the Moodle Platform of the University.

From the beginning, our approach focused on not only being able to cast our teaching sessions but also to provide offline access to the recording. This approach was welcomed by our students, who informally expressed their opinion on its usefulness. To better understand their point, and in order to give all of them the chance to participate in the debate, we finally decided to make an open survey on the students' usage, impressions and suggestions about our teaching proposal: either face-to-face or online synchronous lectures supported with live captures that are asynchronously accessible right after every session. Our goal is to gain a better understanding of the perception of this group of students of the usefulness of the recorded lectures, not as a primary education source but as a complement to the synchronous lectures.

The participants in the survey find the lecture recordings to be a useful tool. They inform that they mainly review the recorded lectures to make up for missed lectures, to review some key concepts, and to prepare for exams. They have the perception that the reviewing of the recorded lectures has helped them to better understand the concepts and ideas explained in the synchronous sessions of the different subjects. A majority of them also think that using and reviewing the recordings has also helped them to obtain better marks in their exams.

In general terms, the participants consider that being able to review the lectures has not had a big impact on their personal assistance to the synchronous sessions. However, they feel that it has had a significant impact on the assistance of the students, as a whole.

Finally, we asked the students if other modules they had attended were using similar methods, also recording the synchronous sessions. We found that, in general, less than 40% of the modules were using this tool.

Keywords:

Live Lecture Capture, Higher Education, Survey, Students Perception, COVID-19.