Live Video for Tutorials and Laboratory Sessions Remotely

If educational institutions need to conduct tutorials and laboratory sessions remotely for off-campus students due to the Novel Coronavirus, there are video conferencing and webinar tools for this. Before going out and purchasing a tool, first check if your institution already has one, either bundled with your Learning Management System, or from your network suppler. Examples are Echo360, Adobe Connect, Zoom and Big Blue Button.

These tools do much the same thing. You use a web browser, or downloaded app to send live video from a web camera, and whatever is on your computer screen to students. The students can use a text chat window to reply. There can also be quizzes. All of this can be recorded for later replay. Students can also talk, be seen, and perhaps send what is on their screen, but that gets complicated), especially for large classes. You will want to at least have a moderator to look after the chat, while someone else does the talking.

I suggest using these synchronous tools sparingly, as a supplement to asynchronous online learning. That is, students should be able to watch a recorded video, read some notes, do some sort of exercise step, by step, in their own time. There can then be some synchronous (real-time) activities to help them.

What also helps are activities to connect students to each other online and carefully worded announcements from staff, to the class, to give the sense someone is out there. This is all part of the conventional approach developed for distance education over the last few decades.

The "Learning to Reflect" module I designed  is an example of this approach. The students read the notes, watch the videos, do the quizzes, post to forums, and reply to other students, before the live part. The student gets all the notes at the start of the course. There are also suggested regular posts for the tutor.

Room-based Video and Web Conferencing Merging

Yesterday I had a call from an e-learning support unit, asking if they should install the latest version of Echo 360 with audience response "clicker" functionality. Echo 360 was installed primarily for recording lectures for students to play back later. But it now can provide students with quizzes they can do on their mobile device, live in the classroom (or later at home). So what was a room-based videoconferencing system is offering features of web conferencing (synchronous quizzes) and of an LMS (asynchronous quizzes). The problem then is we have overlapping features from different products.

In this instance I suggested not implementing the quiz function, if it compromised lecture recording. Students are rightly annoyed when a lecture recording fails. Using clickers is not just a matter of enabling software, it requires the "lecturer" to be trained in a new teaching technique.

In the longer term it might be interesting to consider using Webinars for lectures, in place of lecture recording software. Students in the room can then use the quizzes and text chat functions of the Webinar, as can remote students. This can be recorded and made available to students for later replay. This involves flipping the thinking about the form of education, from it being a "lecture" which is broadcast for some who can't attend, to an on-line event which has some participants in the same room (a "lecture theater").

Lecture Capture Software Survey

Julian Prior, Learning Technologist at Southampton Solent University has reported the results of a Lecture Capture Survey of mostly UK universities. Panopto was the most popular product used, followed by Echo 360. and Camtasia Relay. Most universities have their lecture capture software hosted locally and integrated with the learning management system. One area which I suggest needs to be addressed is integration of the lecture capture software with webinar software. Lecture capture software assumes that "Lectures" are being used: that is a person is addressing a group of students in the same room. The lecture capture consists of a recording of the single speaker's voice, along with visual material presented. This does not allow for more interactive on-campus experiences, where the students provide input, nor for ones where the students are distributed across multiple locations. In theory there is no reason why the webinar software, such as Blackboard, could not be used for lecture capture. Such products have additional features to also record the remote student input. 

Australian National University, where I teach, has selected Echo360 for recording lectures in lecture theaters. This will replace a bespoke system called "Digital Lecture Delivery Service" (DLD), which has been in use since 2004. So in September I dropped in for a demonstration of the new system from Jo Williams at Echo360's Perth office (the product was originally developed at UWA in Perth and then commercialized).

Use of Video Capture at Universities Beyond Lecture Recording

The Australian National University, where I teach, has selected Echo360 for recording lectures in lecture theaters. This will replace a bespoke system called "Digital Lecture Delivery Service" (DLD), which has been in use since 2004. So I dropped in for a demonstration of the new system from Jo Williams at Echo360's Perth office (the product was originally developed at UWA in Perth and then commercialized).
It happens I had seen an early version of this system in use at the UWA's Albany campus, when a consultant for government.

At its most basic Echo360 works like DLD in the lecture theater. The audio is recorded from the same microphone used for the lecture theater. Whatever is on the projection screen is recorded as video. This is usually slides, but can be a document camera recording material, including hand drawn diagrams. Optionally a video of the presenter is also recorded. The presenter just as to remember to start the recording and stop it at the end, whereupon the system makes the recording available via the Learning Management System (LMS), in the case of the ANU, this is Moodle. The student just need a web browser to play the video (PC, Apple Macs and Linux).

Students appreciate having recordings of lectures, for ones they miss or want to go thorough again (students where English is a second language find this particularly useful). Also this is a quick, easy and cheap way to create content for a distance education course. Research shows that a recording of a live lecture with poor quality video and all the unedited gaffs is just as educationally useful as a professionally produced video.

Echo 360 offers some intriguing extra features, some already in the product and others in development. The lecturer can record their lecture at their desk, using software on their PC or Apple Mac (unfortunately Linux is not supported). They can also annotate a recording they have made live in the lecture theater with extra notes for the students. Also notes from students can be shared.

Students can pause the recording of a lecture, rewind and fast forward. An intriguing future possibility would be to pause a live lecture. I discussed the possibility of this in the conference talk and paper "Synchronizing Asynchronous Learning: Combining Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques", and wrote a project proposal for a student to write "Software for Synchronised Asynchronous Constructivist e-Learning". The idea would be to break down the division between what is real time and what is pre-recorded.

Another intriguing possibility is to combine large group interactive sessions with students live in a room and on-line. The use of this form of "interactive engagement" is still controversial at ANU when used just in a classroom, without adding the complication of on-line students as well. However, combining the on-line and classroom students could enrich the experience for both and make it much more lively.