Rosalyn Yorke, a student in the School of Biological Sciences at University of Leeds, says despite her very best efforts, she’s never going to pick up on 100% of what a lecturer says during class. Luckily for her, she’s able to review lecturers anytime she wants.
“I watch lectures online after I’ve sat in them. I tend to put a star in the corner of my notes, jot down the time and try and find it on the lecture capture so I can take more detailed notes, which gives me confidence that I won’t miss anything,” Yorke said. “I definitely know all the lecture material in more detail than I would have if I hadn’t had access to lecture capture.”
Yorke and her classmates say they appreciate the tremendous flexibility having a lecture capture system affords them. They’re retaining knowledge better and seeing improved grades.
“Lecture capture has contributed to my learning by giving me the freedom to access the recordings when and where I want to,” said Samuel Ross, a student in the School of Biology. “It makes it a lot easier to balance revision with other things. In terms of freedom to build on my academic career as well, I was able to go to a conference in London because I didn’t need to fear missing a lecture – it was recorded.”
James Kinch, a student in the School of Mechanical Engineering, re-watches lectures to prepare for tests.
“My field is very mathematically-oriented, quite scientific. We deal with a lot of quantitative data. When it comes to exam time they form a really useful tool to go in and see the content that perhaps I found a little bit more difficult the first time,” he said.
The University of Leeds is transforming their educational experience through highly automated and scalable Mediasite lecture capture. Leeds’ state-of-the-art $3 million deployment is the largest lecture capture program in all of Europe, with 255 classrooms equipped to record. Since Leeds began using Mediasite two years ago, faculty have created 69,400 recordings that have received more than 1 million views each year.
The force behind that massive amount of video is the Mediasite Desktop Recorder. Nearly 7,500 PC’s have the Desktop Recorder installed to create, edit and share videos. One of the primary uses is for flipped instruction – when students watch online videos prior to class to prepare for in-class activities and discussions.
Leeds students are seeing significant improvement to their studies because of the flexibility that a flipped classroom provides. Specifically in STEM courses, like the ones mentioned, flipped instruction can be particularly effective and have a strong impact on student performance.
Jim Bird, application support specialist at Leeds, presented the university’s impressive story at Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite European Summit earlier this summer, sharing comments from students about the benefit of recording lectures.
Hear from Leeds students in this video from Jim’s Summit presentation:
Learn more about the Leeds Mediasite deployment at /casestudies/university-of-leeds/.