Investigating the ‘when viewed’ engagement with lecture capture material of accounting students

ABSTRACT

Lecture Capture (LC) material is accepted to be an available and accessible resource for students in universities across the world. This exploratory study investigates the ‘when viewing’ LC material engagement of accounting undergraduate students. Three categories of engagement are defined, Near-Event-Viewing (NEV), Get-Round-to-Viewing (GRV) and Revision-Time-Viewing (RTV). The understanding of NEV, GRV and RTV, is tested by presenting different perspectives of how the categories are formulised. Comparative results on levels of engagement with LC material and impact on performance show differences between students across the different years of study. For example, for final year students, NEV of LC material has a noticeable positive impact on performance, compared with other viewing categories (GRV and RTV). The scale of these differences is also dependent on the considered perspective formulisation of the ‘when viewing’ LC material categories, acknowledging the caution necessary if/when universities formulise such ‘when viewed’ thinking on their available LC material.

KEYWORDS:

• Lecture capture
• COVID-19
• lecture recording
• online
• higher education
• accounting

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of our colleagues Daniel Taylor and Jonathan Griffiths and thank the journal editors and anonymous referees for their constructive feedback and advice in developing this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some modules contained within our analysis bridged two semesters. They were included within our sample with the condition that they had their first assessment during the January assessment period.

2 Earlier assessments would bias the use of the released LC material, impacting activity through the autumn semester making comparison inappropriate.

3 No demographic data is included in this description of the data, since the priority of the study is to consider the genus of the ‘when viewed’ aspect of LC material engagement. No doubt future research may look at the variation in such viewing in terms of demographic details. Here variation in results are presented based on variations in perspective of formulisations of the ‘when viewed’ categorisations implemented.

4 Although the Business School engaged in a university wide policy where all lectures were recorded, there still remained two potential instances where LC recordings could be omitted: some lecture theatres were not equipped with relevant IT infrastructure to record lectures or individual staff members opted out of the University LC policy.

5 For the module 1A, this is less sudden, it is noteworthy for this module (1A) its January assessment was the least weighted in contribution to the module’s overall mark across considered Year 1 modules. This therefore may be evidence of LC material usage being affected by the associated weight of assessment contribution.

6 These are theoretical examples, and not premised on surveying of students on such experiences.

7 Aldamen et al. (2015) acknowledge the lack of information on whether the student actually viewed the material. However, as with Lewis and Sloan (2012), we assert that the student would have logged on with the intention to view the content of the recorded lectures.

8 In the limit, if student s_i viewed recording r_j on the same day it was first viewed then p_i,j = 0, and if viewed on the day of the associated assessment then p_i,j = 1.

9 We note the start dates on these graphs are Tuesday 2nd Oct, this is because the LC material is updated overnight – hence any LC material produced on Monday 1^st Oct would become available on Tuesday 2nd Oct.