Making Recorded Lectures

One of the reasons for not having any 'live lectures' for a few weeks on TECH2002 was to allow me to experiment with some methods of providing recorded lectures that could be used by the students on demand and at personal convenience. We live in a Sky + environment in a few ways. Imagine if you could pause live lectures - well now you can, kinda. And replay or play out of linear order. You can skip - is that a good thing? You can probably think of lots of times when you've wanted to do that in live lectures.

The first three lectures that I have recorded narration for the PowerPoint slides were made using Articulate which is a plug-in for PowerPoint. The software allows you to add other features before converting everything to Flash for presentation such as other multimedia elements, customizable templates, quizzes and learning games. Learning games? Life is a game, isn't that enough?

A live lecture has to start and finish at a particular time, it is timetabled. We have to be there to experience it, in a room at a particular time. But with an online lecture you could be anywhere at anytime. My experience is that quite a few students struggle to be in place on time - and of course to be there at all. Similarly, I think that not all my students will listen to the recorded lecture or maybe not all way through.

If the audience can be flexible, so can I. I suppose the lecture should be online and available at the timetabled day and hour - if I play the game properly, yes, but I have taken advantage of this slippery deadline that is not normally available to me - normally I have to be ready at the appointed time, but I guessed that people would not be logging in at the timetabled hour to view the lecture (is that right?). I don't think this was a deliberate strategy. I found that it took some time to add narration and when I looked at the slides I had to think whether or not they would work in this way, and in week 4 I just felt like I had to do a major re-write to reflect what we were doing - and so the upload became irregular and unpredictable, and that is a downside, since it doesn't replace the lecture at a strictly appointed time and it puts unfair onus on the students to catch up because of my tardiness.

Recorded lectures could be used to supplement live lectures as 'bonus features'. They can become short podcasts that are not 'instead of' lectures but provide summaries about the main points without all the fat and the padding - get down to the nitty gritty. And perhaps I will explore that another time.

My approach to recording the narration for the lecture presentation was to talk to the slides in a similar way that I would have done in the lecture room, but it is a very different experience. In the lecture room I am likely to improvise a bit and try and make a connection with the people in the room. When you record the narration, you focus on the slide and try to make it more understandable. The focus is all on the slide and you notice how sometimes the slide can't work in the same way that it would in the live lecture - such as showing a video or something. The slides were prepared for a live lecture, and not for recorded narration. I have never done this before, and I would like to spend some time reflecting on the possibility of developing more specific ways of using the visual slide and the audio so that it can become a more individual or effective way of communicating. The interactivity of a live and a recorded lecture is different.

At first the recording of the lecture felt very limiting. I decided to take the easiest approach and used a microphone plugged straight into my laptop and recorded one slide at a time. I found the results very stilted. I found myself talking unnaturally slowly and trying not to make slips. I ended up doing quite a few retakes because it didn't seem perfect and sometimes the speech would just dry up and I would have to start again - which doesn't usually ahppen when you are not recording it. By the third attempt I was less bothered about slips and 'ers' and 'ums' - I felt like it was beginning to be more like it would have been in the classroom lecture. The idea of perfection became less important to me - but it still takes longer to record than doing it live.

Is it worth it? I would like to know your views so leave me a comment.

I think it's time to experiment a bit further with a new approach - maybe doing a separate audio podcast and slideshow and then putting them together on Slideshare.