Learn Plus is Coming!

The ELTT team have been having a lot of meetings with the Learn Plus (formerly Lectures Online) project team recently, in particular around what we’ve termed the knowledgebase – a central knowledge base providing guidance on best practice and case studies for staff. We’ve already had e-mails to the ELTT mailbox from staff around the subject of lecture capture and resources generally, so we thought it would be a good idea to make these resources available to everyone, as an initial blog post (first of many!) around the whole capture process.

So this week’s post is a joint blog by Dewi and Tony Lancaster. Tony is the Business Change Manager for the Learn Plus project, and is in charge of the day to day running of the project.

The initial phase of Learn Plus is due to be rolled out by September – and the four shortlisted vendors are due to give presentations throughout March to University staff. We are very pleased to be able to now give you the dates for these  – which will all be held in the Glamorgan Building Council Chamber: 2nd March, 12th March, 19th March, 27th March. All demos will take place between 10:00 and 11:00am (Product Overviews). Please email LearnPlus@Cardiff.ac.uk if you wish to attend or for further information.

Once we have picked the vendor, we expect to get the ball rolling quickly with working on specific resources, good practice and working with early adopters. We are more than happy to speak with staff, and possibly give you some ideas.

During the demonstrations, each vendor will give a one hour overview of their product, and we’d like to invite you to attend in order to view and comment on their offering. We’ll be asking everyone who attends these sessions to leave feedback and score each of the products. This will then be used by the project team to inform the final choice of vendor – we need your feedback to ensure the final tender award best fits the requirements of the whole University community.

Don’t forget, the Learn Plus project is not only focussed on Lecture Capture, the project will help staff explore new and innovative ways of teaching and course delivery by:

• Recording classroom based activities for students to view online;
• Capturing teaching materials on a computer, tablet or with a mobile phone for students to view online;
• Store, edit and manage content in a secure media library, with embedding possibilities into Learning Central, blogs, wikis etc.

Below are some resources that might interest you in the meantime before a decision is made, to get you thinking about the possibilities for the future. We’ll be putting these on a separate Learn Plus page very soon, but we thought that we would give you a chance to add any relevant materials first – just comment underneath the post.

General Resources

JISC: Tutor Checklist for Lecture Capture (28 August 2013) – a list of key questions for staff to consider before a lecture recording takes place:

An example of a Lecture Capture User Guide from the University of Western Australia: Strategies for engaging your students.

Specific Getting Started Guides

The University of Bath have set up a few pages around their lecture capture project:
General lecture capture page
5 Reasons to Capture Your Practice – Sound evidence-based advice on lecture capture

We really like the Changing Landscapes website by the University of Leeds. Not only do they list the tools within their digital learning environment, but they also list information about the processes – What do you want to do?

University of Greenwich have a site of guidance on different themes including Good Practice and flipped classroom etc.

Screencasting

JISC: Screencasting infokit (a comprehensive guide to the creation and use of screencasts – a feature that will be available on University PCs with Learn Plus).

Screencast.com have a list of Screencasting Best Practices including the basics, narration tips and sound.

And as usual, our colleague Joe Nicholls has put together a very useful CMAP around Screen Capture and Screencasting processes.

Flipped Classroom

The University of Bath have a flipped classroom project. The flipped model is very popular at the moment – with a lot written about it:
Bath Flipping Project
Bath resources on the flipped classroom

We have a flipped classroom example from Cardiff University – Vincent Knight of MATHS (featured in an ELTT blog post last year) gave a talk entitled: “Embedding entrepreneurial learning through the teaching of programming in a flipped classroom” (Soundcloud 19.01min) to our Academic Support Conference this year: Enabling Student Success 2014. His slides are available online too.

Jon Anderson in CPLAN has also done quite a bit of work in this area with his students, and some of his work is available here on his YouTube Channel. Jon has used this method to deliver Skills Development within CPLAN. CPLAN DIGITAL outlines some of the learning and study skills podcasts generated within the School to help students improve their research, learning, and writing talents. Topics include: Plagiarism / How to Reference, Critical Analysis and Qualitative Methods.

Related Papers on Lecture Capture

Student use of Recorded Lectures – A report reviewing recent research into the use of lecture capture technology in higher education, and its impact on teaching methods and attendance.

Lecture capture: making the most of face-to-face learning (Davis 2009)