Tagging and Linking Lecture Audio Recordings: Goals and Practice
This addresses a problem for students and educators in educational technology, but the results are incremental as they highlight barriers rather than breakthroughs.
The paper tackled the underutilization of lecture audio recordings by developing a tool to enrich student interactions, but found lower-than-expected usage in experiments during the 2012-13 session.
Making and distributing audio recordings of lectures is cheap and technically straightforward, and these recordings represent an underexploited teaching resource. We explore the reasons why such recordings are not more used; we believe the barriers inhibiting such use should be easily overcome. Students can listen to a lecture they missed, or re-listen to a lecture at revision time, but their interaction is limited by the affordances of the replaying technology. Listening to lecture audio is generally solitary, linear, and disjoint from other available media. In this paper, we describe a tool we are developing at the University of Glasgow, which enriches students' interactions with lecture audio. We describe our experiments with this tool in session 2012--13. Fewer students used the tool than we expected would naturally do so, and we discuss some possible explanations for this.