According to surveys conducted all over the world, the overwhelming majority of higher education students – once exposed to it – greatly value the affordances offered to them through lecture capture. They rate highly the ability to re-live the lecture experience at their own convenience and at their own pace and, once they’ve had it in one class, they tend to want it in every class. It quickly becomes part of the teaching and learning fabric of an institution, and one that students cherish and depend on.

But these student satisfaction surveys, whilst useful in their own right, teach us nothing about how lecture recordings are actually used by students, and why.

A group of researchers from three Australian universities (Murdoch University, the University of Newcastle and Macquarie University) conducted a fascinating project in 2009-2010 – having been successful in their application for an Echo360 Research Grant – that attempted to track and understand the studying behaviours of students in relation to lecture capture. In doing so, the group didn’t focus on gauging student satisfaction with the technology, but concentrated instead on analysing patterns actual usage of lecture capture by students.

One of the outcomes of their research was that they defined ten different categories of lecture capture usage: Conscientious, High-achieving, Good-intentioned, Repentant, Binging, Free-timers, Cramming, One-hit wonders, Random and Disengaged. And they found that categories that may previously have been thought to demonstrate poor learning practice (such as cramming) weren’t always what they seemed.

The paper that was produced as a result of this project, authored by Phillips, R. et al, entitled *Using academic analytic tools to investigate studying behaviours in technology-supported learning environments* and presented at ascilite 2010, can be viewed via
http://echo360.com/student-viewing-habits/?utm_source=Chron&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=lrg&=3