So, we are now already four months into the project and this blog post provides an overview of where we’ve got to….
The project aimed to recruit ten lecturers to participate in the project and we decided to enlist three participants for the first phase (October – December) – the rationale being that any teething problems with the technology would be likely to occur in this phase and we may want to refine our evaluation methods in light of our initial findings.
Two of our the three participants were from the School of Psychology with a third from School of Global Studies (Department of Geography) and they have used PCAP in a number of exciting ways.
- One of the Psychology lecturers used it to help student to prepare for a computer lab class by recording a walk-through of the web-based resources that student would need to access during the lab.
- The other Psychology tutor used PCAP to record student presentations – giving students the ability to review their presentations alongside the feedback received from the tutor. The students agreed to be recorded using PCAP on the condition that the tutor recorded the series of lectures (pretty canny students if you ask me)
- The lecturer in Geography used it to both provide resources that complemented his lectures (see screenshot, below) and to give some pointers to a mid-term test and some feedback to the cohort on the test.
We have been evaluating the students’ experiences through questionnaires and we are in the process of analysing these data. At first glance, student experiences have been very positive. I guess this isn’t so surprising – we know that students like resources to support their learning – so we are now running focus groups with students to try and unpick why they feel that this medium could be a valuable tool for learning. We are also interviewing the staff to evaluate the extent to which they feel the recordings are a useful learning tool and to gauge how long it takes to make a recording.
We’ll be writing about these findings and our next phase of the project soon.