We’ve discussed teacher observations in earlier blogs, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of all the benefits of recording lessons. Let’s dive deeper into the many pros of keeping digital recordings of your classes.
- Accessibility
One major benefit of recording lectures is the increased accessibility it provides. For students with varying attention spans or processing disorders, the freedom to return to a lecture as many times as necessary is a boon. Students can increase or decrease the playback speed as needed to ensure understanding.
- Individualization
This individualization serves students of all abilities and learning types, and recorded lectures also offer unprecedented flexibility. Time, geography, and conflicts often affect class attendance. A recorded lecture transcends those boundaries. It opens up distance learning opportunities, and it also allows students who’ve missed class due to illness or other constraints to get back up to speed.
- Student Engagement
While some professors worry that the ready availability of recorded lectures will adversely affect class attendance, so far this does not seem to be the case. (And honestly, you may want to revise your perspective on attendance to acknowledge the versatility of recorded lectures.) However, there is some evidence that access to recorded lectures increases student engagement. Once you’ve been recording lectures for a semester, you can even offer videos ahead of time, allowing students to develop a knowledge base that will spur and enrich classroom discussions.
- Student Autonomy
Video lectures can assist your institution in creating online-only course offerings. These learning opportunities are in high demand, both among highly-scheduled traditional students, and professionals seeking to update their credentials. Online course offerings give learners an unprecedented degree of autonomy. Coursework can flex around job and family commitments, and when students have a block of time, they can listen to multiple lectures in one sitting.
- Enhanced recordings
Another interesting facet of recorded lectures is the potential for enhanced recordings. With a little savvy, you can add captioning after the fact. This is incredibly helpful for ESL students, and for ESL professors, too. Alternatively, you can create transcripts that students can use to follow along with lectures. If your course happens to be data-heavy, you might want to include animations of anything from graphs and tables, to solutions to math problems.
- Analytics
One last point to consider is the potential value of analytics. Often, our end-of-course student evaluations are the best feedback we get. But when we offer video lessons online, we can gather analytics on how many students are viewing specific lectures, and how often. If we include a comment function, we can gather even more data about student understanding. Students who don’t speak much in class can be surprisingly talkative online. You might be surprised how much you’ll learn about student understanding and retention!
Video lessons provide a host of benefits to students and educators alike. Check in for more discussion of this topic in upcoming weeks.