At universities around the world, finals season is upon us. All across campus, libraries are filled shoulder to shoulder, notebooks are spread out on the table — and videos are playing on smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
Lecture capture video — recordings of classroom sessions made available to students on-demand — continues to surge in popularity, as more and more students at more and more schools discover how helpful it is to be able to review class sessions directly while studying.
How popular is lecture capture at examination time? Just take a look at this chart from the University of Southampton, showing the amount of video its students are viewing on the school’s lecture capture video platform from Panopto.
That's a month and a half of 24/7 video in the week before the exam period #panopto pic.twitter.com/vw54gQroKJ
— iSolutions MLE (@uos_mle) May 19, 2014
Not only do students rush to the video library as exams near, but they seek out more and more video each successive semester — watching a month and a half’s worth of video in the week before this most recent exam period.
What makes lecture capture so popular among students?
Recording lectures and allowing students to access those videos on-demand gives students the opportunity to participate more freely and think more broadly during class sessions.
University Business has reported professors speak at a rate of 120 words per minute — while most students can only write at 20. Video recordings of the class session frees students from the challenge of taking detailed notes, giving them the ability to engage more fully with the lecture without the fear of missing some important fact in their notes.
Along with alleviating the burden of note taking, lecture recordings provide students with a new means to revisit complex materials. Without video, when a student doesn’t understand a concept, they must either consult the textbook or seek out a professor during office hours. Video lecture recordings offer an easy alternative — the ability to rewind and watch again. This simple option helps students better learn at their own pace.
How do students use lecture video?
In 2013, Newcastle University in the UK surveyed students about their reasons for watching recorded lectures on demand. The results indicate that lecture capture is most frequently used for reviewing difficult topics covered in class and for exam preparation. A similar survey at Aberystwyth University in 2011 yielded similar results.
Does offering lecture capture video help students succeed?
Every student’s needs are unique, and no single approach works for every scholar. But in report after report and classroom after classroom, a blended learning solution including lecture capture tends to help more students perform better.
Take a look at the improvements experienced at Winston-Salem State, after the school made on-demand lectures available for an advanced biology course. Over the course of a semester, the school compared performance of students who actively used the lecture capture system with those who didn’t. Students that used the recorded lectures earned significantly higher grades than those that hadn’t, and the overall failure rate for the class fell from nearly 40% to less than 10%.
Your students want you to record your lectures. Is your school ready?
For academic institutions in search of a lecture capture solution, Panopto provides cost-effective, easy-to-use software that integrates with your learning management systems and scales from small departmental deployments to campus-wide installations. Our software is also used by hundreds of institutions around the world as part of a flipped classroom pedagogy and build “campus YouTubes”.
See how Panopto can help you better serve your students. Request a free trial or contact our team for a demo and find out why we’re the fastest growing lecture capture solution on the market.
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