CLIPP Board

Understanding of IPR

Intellectual Property Right

Image released by Joseph Robertson

University College Falmouth have released a free Intellectual Property Right course, IPR4EE, aimed at anyone who produces learning and teaching materials for students.

IPR4EE is an Open Educational Resources (OER) project funded by HEFCE and supported by JISC and the Higher Education Academy. It seeks to raise awareness of intellectual property rights for higher educational lecturers and staff developing online and/or openly available learning resources.

Aston is due to release a suite of resources under the O4B ‘Open For Business’ OER OMAC project. The CLIPP deparment have been busy repurposing existing learning objects to be released under Creative Commons licence, suitable for a range of subject disciplines. More of this later in the summer, when we’ve uploaded all learning objects.

All resources created by Aston will be deposited in Jorum under the meta tag AUOER

Lecture capture – doing it well and at scale

Queen Mary, University of London.
June 16^th 2011

Earlier in the month I attended the ALT event Lecture capture – doing it well and at scale at Queen Mary, University of London. Lecture Capture is something that CLIPP has been involved in for three years now; having piloted Mediasite and Echo360, we now run Panopto, branded as Aston Replay for our students, and have it installed in all of our centrally booked lecture theatres.

After brief introductions from the exhibitors, Eoin McDonnell from QMU kicked off proceedings talking about their experiences of rolling out lecture capture, focusing on staff attitudes and anxieties to lecture capture. 13% of lecturers responding to a survey said they were ‘violently opposed’ to lecture capture and of those, 100% had accessed lecture recordings from other universities. Students at QMU viewed the recorded sessions as a backup to the real thing – they still want lectures.

Lecture Capture at Aston, 1980s style

Kris Roger from London School of Economics spoke about how lecture capture at LSE started out with a single VCR as a  response to a request from a lecturer to needing to implement a scaleable solution across the institution. Aston has a long history of using video, meaning we started out with more than one VCR (see right for a shot from the archives).

The next two sessions were people who’ve built their own solutions. Dr. Marco Zennaro and Dr. Enrique Canessa, from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, demonstrated a system that was developed in house at ICTP called openEyA – a  low cost solution running from an Ubuntu based netbook. At the time of writing, they have 7565 recorded hours of physics and mathmatics lectures available to view online. Dr. Neil Berry, University of Liverpool, demonstrated the use of capturing audio and computer screen during a lecture to provide recordings of Chemistry teaching.

Juliet Hinrichsen and Amanda Hardy from Coventry University discussed issues around staff development, and have a wealth of OER available on their website. While we have a lot of support materials available for staff, we don’t have many for students to get the most out of Replay which is something we will address over the summer.

Graham McElearney closed the day by talking about copyright. In a nutshell, if we didn’t make it, didn’t buy it, and it hasn’t been given to us then it isn’t ours to use. There are also limits on what can be recorded, while a lecturer is entitled to show a clip from a TV programme in a lecture room, they can’t record it.

The key thing that I took away from the event is that lecture capture will highlight any weaknesses already present in processes, a common example given was a lack of communication (a decision was took centrally to record lectures, but the first time the lecturers knew was when they received an automatic email telling them their recording was ready). Here at Aston, we don’t centrally control the recordings, we give the freedom to the lecturer to choose what and when to record. The main complaint we get is users have to log in twice to make a recording – once to the PC, and once to the recording software. This is down to the way PCs in our lecture theatres are configured and is something we’re keen to fix.

The Twitter backchannel at events is invaluable, providing extra content and encouraging discussion. I’ve collated some (ok, a lot) of the tweets about the event on Storify, and next time I’m at a similar event I’ll make sure I’ve got a laptop, rather than rely on my mobile phone.

How to double your student exam scores (yes, really!)

On 13 May, Deslauriers et al (2011) published a paper in Science (impact factor 29.7) where they demonstrated the hugely beneficial effect of a teaching method called ‘deliberate practice’ (see chart below).

They employed this method for 3 × 50 mins in week 12 of a module – each of the previous 11 weeks had contained 3 × 50 mins of traditional lectures. When contrasted against a cohort that had received traditional lectures in week 12, the subsequent scores in a 15-20 minute MCQ class test were amazing… particularly as deliberate practice was taught by relatively inexperienced teaching assistants, whereas the traditional lectures were given by a highly experienced lecturer who often attained high student feedback.

What is deliberate practice?

It is an active learning approach, which uses the whole of the lecture time for problem-centred learning, and where the students frequently receive feedback.

How did Deslauriers et al implement deliberate practice in their teaching sessions?

One instructor and one assistant ran the class of 271 students. Before each session, the students were instructed to read a 3-4 page reading and answer a related on-line true-false quiz. At the start of the first teaching session, the students were told the rationale for the use of deliberate practice (and supporting research was cited).

A typical session schedule was:

An MCQ question was posed, and students discussed the answer with other students (2-3 mins).

The students gave their answers using ‘clicker’ handsets (like Optivote), and the instructor gave feedback to the whole cohort (4-6 mins).

This process was repeated with another 5 different MCQs.

Sometimes, an MCQ was presented twice in succession, presumably so that the effect of the instructor feedback and 2^nd student discussion could be measured. Note that this seems to suggest that the instructor feedback did not always give the correct answer.

Twice in each teaching session, there was a small-group active learning task (6 mins), followed by instructor feedback (4-6 mins).

How long did it take to prepare each 50-minute teaching session?

Including the pre-session reading quiz, 20 hours at first, dropping to 10 hours for the 3^rd session. But the authors estimate that this would fall to 5 hours with practice. Note that these times include piloting the materials with one or two students, and subsequent editing.

How was deliberate practice received by the students?

Deslauriers et al surveyed the students and found that they enjoyed it more and thought that they learnt more than in traditional lectures. Interestingly, students thought that they learnt much more in class than from the pre-reading with quiz, even though the majority (all?) of the new information came from the pre-reading.

What conclusions can be drawn?

An active learning approach with frequent feedback…

• is better than a traditional lecture.
• can be applied with large cohorts.
• does not need many teaching assistants.
• does not take a lot longer to prepare (when practiced).

Where can I find out more?

A hard copy of the Deslauriers et al paper is in Aton’s library (but is not available electronically yet). The supplementary material is available at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6031/862/suppl/DC1.

Reference

Deslauriers, L., E., Schelew, E. & Wieman, C. (2011) Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class. Science 332(6031): 862-864.