Audio Recordings of Lectures as an E-Learning Resource

Jim Balfour – SBE

Overview

• Why Now?

• Why bother?

• The Downside!

• The Process

• Pull of Push?

• Student Reaction

• Conclusion

Why now? what’s changed?

In a word – Technology

• Personal music players (e.g. iPods) allow digital audio to played anywhere, any time

• Consumer electronics make recording audio cheap and easy

• Free (or almost free) audio editing software makes it quick and easy to ‘chunk-up’ a recording

• VLEs, LMSs, etc make audio delivery over the web accessible to anyone with a web connection

Advantage to students when

• A lecture is missed

• English is not the first language

• Baffled first time through

• Annotating lecture notes after the ‘event’

• Attempting tutorial questions/revision

• Engaged in distance and/or part-time learning

• Suffering from some special need (e.g. impaired hearing)

Advantages for staff

Professional Development

Student engagement

Encourages independent learning

Less ‘knocks on the door’

Big potential for distance learning delivery

Lower failure rates?

It’s sustainable!

The Downside!

More technology

Staff time

Hardware costs

Software costs

Might ‘encourage’ students to miss lectures

Record lecture (128 kbs)

Move file from MP3 player to

PC

Save files from WavePad files

as 24 kbs MP3s

‘Chunk-up’ audio file using

WavePad

Upload 24 kbs MP3 files to VLE

The Process

Click boxes forAdditional slides

Pull or Push?

Pull relies on students downloading (or streaming) the audio files

Push (or Podcasting) requires Podcasting software on the student’s computer that will automatically download new content from a Podcast server

Results of Questionnaire Survey

2 out of 3 students responded

The resource was not universally used (55%)

Many who did not use the resource thought it would have helped them to learn (40%)

The audio files were found to be Useful (3) on a scale Not Useful at All (1) to Extremely Useful (5)

No measurable difference in exam performance between listeners and non-listeners

The ‘freshness’ of the audio files is regarded as important

Total Learning EnhancementCost of Production and

Delivery

Conclusions

Making audio recording of lectures available to

students is now easy, quick and inexpensive

The contribution to student learning made by

the files justifies the effort of producing them,

i.e. they have a high Value Added Ratio

Value Added Ratio =

Podcast Your Lectures

Jim Balfour – SBE

Mp3 Player

WavePad

MP3 Player Software

Saving as 24 kbs MP3

Upload to VLE