January 17, 2006
Casting Class Aside
Coursecasting may be the teaching tool du jour at college campuses across the country, but skeptical professors say the technology is confirming their worst fear—that students who can listen to lectures on their MP3 players won’t bother showing up for class.
Some professors who have posted lectures online are starting to tell horror stories like that of Americ Azevedo, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. After Mr. Azevedo started podcasting last year, attendance in his "Introduction to Computers" course occasionally dropped from 200 enrolled students to about 20 people.
"Getting students out of their media bubble to be here is getting progressively harder," the professor says. (Los Angeles Times)
To read more about coursecasting, see an article from The Chronicle by Brock Read.
Posted on Tuesday January 17, 2006 | Permalink |Comments
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I have found exactly the same thing and have a plot of attendance over the term ending at 10-20% when podcasts and screencasts were available. If the students are performing just as well (and they do in my classes) then that just highlights that lecturing is perhaps not the best use of an educator’s time in class. This is the second term that I assign recorded lectures and do workshops instead during class time. Far from being a nightmare, this is a great opportunity for educators to connect with students in a more personal way.
Here is a post-morterm analysis of last term:
http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2005/12/archived-lectures-and-workshops-post.html
— Jean-Claude Bradley Jan 19, 04:04 PM #
I have found the opposite to be true. I podcast all my lectures in my Intro Geology classes last semester and actually saw an increase in attendance over the previous two semesters. Here’s my own post mortem of my experience – student comments were uniformly positive: http://www.fhsu.edu/blogcat/?q=node/102
— Ron Schott Jan 19, 04:05 PM #
Podcasting offers a great convenience factor, but the notion of capturing presentations for later replay isn’t new, nor are the concerns. Recall that for many years, lectures were captured in books. The “students won’t come to class” objection may say more about the instructor than about podcasting.
The increasing convenience of recording relatively noninteractive presentations for playback just helps us add the lecture to other asynchronously available materials, such as books, articles, videos, etc. We can develop “lectures” to fill in the gaps and add unique material, archive it, and spend more time interacting with students in class.
One concern might be student workload. If you’re now requiring students to both “attend” your lecture and participate in lively interactive classes, do you then reduce, e.g., reading assignments?
— Joe Clark Jan 19, 04:06 PM #
Joe – in response to your question of adding to the student workload, having access to lecture screencasts reduces the need to assign reading assignments. If the lectures are not recorded, students have no choice but to go to a reading resource. When the lectures are recorded, they can either watch a part of the lecture again or read, depending on their preferred learning mode. Also note that I don’t require attendance at workshops. Students use them as much or as little as they need to solve their particular problems with the class material.
— Jean-Claude Bradley Jan 19, 04:07 PM #
One of my noted that my name was mentioned here. The article from the L.A. Times and another in Nov. 28th Newsweek have put attention on the dark side of course casting.
Actually, I see podcasting and webcasting as a great opportunity to move lecture classes toward socratic dialogue. They problem is learning how to do it. That is my big project for this semester.
— Americ Azevedo Jan 19, 04:08 PM #
P.S. Sorry for all the writing errors in the above post. I hit the “post” button too soon.
— Americ Azevedo Jan 19, 04:08 PM #