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Education

New classroom learning technologies

By Kelly Ng | 6 April 2010

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) believes in combining the best of traditional classroom and online learning. Steve Ryan, Director, Centre for Learning Technology, revealed two technologies – clickers and lecture capture – which have proved to enhance the learning experience.

“A pilot project last year on the use of clickers in the classroom was highly successful,” said Ryan. “While it is difficult to quantify the impact of clickers on students’ grades – because there are so many unique variables – our survey on the 300 students involved in the pilot yielded very positive results.” Two thirds of students felt that they learnt more in classes which used clickers compared to classes that did not.

In the next academic year, LSE planned to scale out the use of clickers to all 1500 first year undergraduate students. This will be implemented for the course ‘LSE100 – Thinking like a Social Scientist’, which is an introductory course to help students appreciate the breadth of social sciences. Several techniques can be employed when clickers are used in the classroom. Clickers help pace a lecture as it can be used to quickly check students understanding. Teachers can pose a difficult question which is likely to generate a range of responses, then ask students to discuss among themselves, and then vote again. From experience, students’ understanding will improve considerably after such a discussion.

“A factor that teachers need to consider is that such techniques do take up time,” advised Ryan. “While the use of clickers helps check and improve students’ understanding, teachers might not be able to cover as much materials in that class if they are using clickers.”

Lecture capture is the other technology Ryan has found effective and well-received by students at LSE. “Being able to watch a recorded lecture is particularly useful for students whose first language is not English. Or for technical courses which involve lots of formulae and graphs,” observed Ryan.

LSE captured 1000 hours of lectures last year and attracted around 30,000 views a month. This figure is substantial considering LSE’s relative small student population of 9000 and that the recorded lectures are only available to LSE students who are enrolled in certain courses.

Currently, 30 out of approximately 100 lecture rooms are installed with lecture capture facilities. 2000 hours of lectures have already been captured this year. Ryan plans to scale up this project due to its popularity among students. “From our surveys, students reported that lecture capture is valuable and important to them. On the rare occasions that there is a technical problem on the system, students get very upset. This is a good indication that it is important to them,” joked Ryan.

The lecture capture system records not just the lecturer’s voice but also the presentation slides. Students can see the lecturer on a small window, and the concurrent presentation on another. More importantly, students can easily navigate around a single lecture by clicking on the portion of the recording. Instead of watching the entire video in a linear fashion, students can jump right to the middle of the lecture which he or she missed or did not understand.

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