Picture taken by me in the street. No rights reserved by me.
The University has offered lecture recording on an opt-in basis for around ten years and recently made significant investment to provide a new central lecture recording service, Media Hopper Replay, in September 2017. The new service is running successfully so far with a good many colleagues using it to deliver recordings of their lectures for their students to review.
Beginning the second semester of our new service we have more than 60,000 recordings made to the end of December. It is very popular with students with around 190,000 student views. December was the top month for replaying content – over 70,000 hours.
We are consulting, on behalf of Senate Learning and Teaching Committee, on a proposed new lecture recording policy to support us in consistently delivering the benefits of the service both to students and to staff.. Please submit your responses or questions by 19 February 2018.
The new policy seeks to maximise the number of lectures recorded, and hence the consistency of the student experience, while retaining appropriate scope for a lecturer to opt out of recording a lecture where the interests in not recording outweigh the interests in recording. It is intended that the lecture recording policy will provide the necessary clarity and reassurance to lecturers and students on data use, data security and data protection; intellectual property rights within the recordings; avoidance of copyright infringement; and equality of access to lectures and recordings.
Assuming the new policy comes into force in Summer 2018, it will dovetail with an integration of the lecture recording service and the timetabling system and with an expansion of the service to cover nearly 300 rooms. Indeed, given the ongoing expansion of the service, the availability of comprehensive training, and continued demand from students, I would encourage colleagues in all Schools to consider initiating or expanding their use of the service this semester.
For the text of the proposed policy and full supporting information, please review the consultation website that is now available to all staff and students. (EASE authentication required.) While the consultation encourages colleagues and students to contribute to aggregate responses, it also leaves open the option for them to respond individually.
In addition to responses from Heads of Schools, Colleges and Support Groups, we are also seeking the views of the trade unions, of students via the Students’ Association and of conveners of the Knowledge Strategy Committee, Library Committee, the Directors of Teaching network, the Lecture Recording Programme Board, Academic User Group and Engagement and Evaluation Group.
I’m very pleased to say we now have more than 10,000 lynda.com subscribers at the University of Edinburgh. Digital skills are in considerable demand as we know from the news and are also key to the capability within the institution for staff to be effective in their roles.
There’s only a small team in LTW but we augment that with a pool of 50 tutors from across ISG. This makes it possible to offer a broad programme drawing from experts in particular packages and technology areas. Because of this we are one of the largest training providers on campus, and key to ensuring that the University delivers on one of the elements of the people strategy: to ensure that staff and students have the digital skills that they need.
For students, the digital skills programme is co-curricular – it runs alongside the formal curriculum delivered in schools, and for many people it is an important part of the student experience- they can learn additional skills alongside and to help them with the subjects they study.
We deliver a wide range of teaching and learning and development, Jenni and her team have been doing a lot this year to map our training on to the JISC digital skills framework and to bring all the various skill training across ISG into one comprehensive programme. They have also delivered a huge training programme for the rollout of lecture recording.
Jenni has also been making plans to expand the programme by bringing students as tutors into the team and developing a job description for part time student trainers. For those students the job will provide an opportunity to get real work experience and teaching practice. The digital skills programme could not run without the contribution that colleagues make- it is a contribution to the staff and student experience, and a contribution of ISG in terms of the excellent services we provide. It’s also an important professional and personal development activity.
Being a good teacher is a skill- not everyone can do it and not everyone should. But for those who are good at it and do enjoy it is an opportunity to learn your subject inside out- to understand users, to engage with learners and to develop confident communication skills. If you feel you have something to contribute to the ISG Digital Skills programme, let me know.
EqualBITE: Gender equality in higher education is an open access book to which I contributed a chapter. My chapter is about the positive power of wikipedia editathons, but the book contains a full range of ideas and responses to tackling the real lived experience of inequality in higher education.
The piece I wrote I wrote a long time ago, before we even had a wikimedian in residence and before the Playfair Steps had really got going. The book has taken a while to come to fruition. It began as an idea to develop a set of ‘recipies’, with each of the contributions having a witty pun-laden title styled as instructions, method and ingredients. I thought that was a cute idea, but seemingly the author team lost their resolve for this, decided that recipies were too girly and decided to adopt a more formal style.
The result is still good though.
It’s free to download, or you could buy it.
It would make a lovely Christmas present.
Trinity College Dublin, Jedi Archive. Picture taken by me. No rights reserved by me.
After swearing for years I would never sit another exam, I have finally bit the bullet and became a student again.
I am conscious that my development as a researcher will require me to think in new ways, but also that I will bring much of my own experience and previous knowledge to the task. As an experienced professional I have been successful in using those things which I ‘just know to be true’ as the basis for my professional practice without much reflection on how this knowing has been arrived at. I am well aware that particularly with regard to workplace issues of equality and diversity many of my colleagues do not think as I do, so it is not a position which can be assumed as shared. It will be challenging to go back to basics and understand why I think the way I think and make a clear justification for the approaches I choose. It will also be interesting to gain new understanding of the ‘researcher language’ of ethics, ontologies, epistemologies and the various ‘isms’. In the course of writing my first asssignment I have found myself referring to dictionaries and encyclopaedia in a way I have not done for a while. I have also had occasion to reach into my dusty book piles for Wenger’s community of practice , Schon’s reflective practitioner, Kolb’s learning cycle , Handy’s organizations and Lewin’s action researcher. It is nice to see these old friends again.
In the classroom it was interesting to become a student again. I did my masters more than 15 years ago. It was fun to see how a room full of successful professionals cope with being challenged to identify the sheer scale of stuff that they do not know when faced with the daunting writing task. As well as researcher-thinking skills I will need to develop new digital skills. I’m fairly confident in searching the internet and library catalogues, and I think/hope I am ok at evaluating sources for credibility. Taking a critical researcher view again will be different. I will also have to learn to use Endnote and wrangle a large (document) piece of writing much longer than the reports and projects plans I write day-to-day.
Actually, I didn’t dream it. I was there to present to Academic Senate. Senate means ‘old men’, in case you didn’t know. It’s from the Latin.
Our Senate at Edinburgh University is actually fairly mixed, and the room was packed for a discussion about ‘The Future of Distance Learning’, and that is my bag.
I have to say though, the AV technology brought in for the event, while lovely, and useful, kinda spoiled the point of the venue. St Cecilia’s is famous for its age and its accoustics. It is set out with amphitheatre steps to sit on around the sides like those Latin-speaking senators might have done in ancient times. I think we should have spoken from the performance area without ppt slides* and been our own projectors.
St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh
In case you are wondering , University of Edinburgh currently has about 2,920 distance learning students studying via online programmes at Masters level. We have 65 programmes – (with about 100 permutations).
In terms of cohort size, 7 out of top 10 are CMVM programmes. Surgical Sciences peaked in 2014/15 (155) and has returned to its previous steady state level (105). Yes, we do teach surgery online. Most other programmes teach fewer than 35 students per year.
For the demographic fans amongst you we have 62% women studying online masters compared with 57% of all masters students. Our online students are also older than our on-campus ones. 88% are over 25. We have students from 134 countries studying online. 60% reside outside the UK; but that is not very different from the domicile of our on campus students. The top 6 countries are all English speaking ( Scotland, England USA, Australia, Canada, Ireland) and account for 59% of students
A significant difference in the student mix is that there are few Chinese online students, whereas they account for 21% of campus based PGT students. Our MOOC learners come from all over the world… but despite there being 2million of them, only 80 apply for online masters.
Only 1.4 % of our online learners are our alumni.
Alumnus is also Latin, it means ‘foster-son or pupil’. Alumna is for women.
*I had lovely slides designed by Yujia in a colour scheme to match the venue as you can see.
Cover of our BITS magazine designed by our ISG Graphic Design Service designers
This week is Information Security Awareness Week at University of Edinburgh. The graphic design team have made a range of lovely graphics for them based on treasure, phishing, pirates, datastewards etc. And I invented a tagline and hashtag for them.
The information, datasets and creative content we work with every day are valuable assets to the University and to other people. We should treat them like treasure. We should know where they are, how safe they are, who has access to them and how easily they might be stolen. Our feature topic for this issue of BITS is information security. This magazine is part of a University-wide awareness raising initiative for all colleagues and students to take care.
We have information and advice about what you can do to keep you and your work safe, and what the institution support services are doing to make that easy. Don’t underestimate how attractive even your most mundane information about people, processes and finances might be to someone looking in from outside.
The @UoEInfosec team have sometimes seemed reluctant to use the #treatitliketreasure hashtag in their tweets.
I wondered if perhaps they don’t like it.
I asked.
‘I don’t really understand how twitter hashtags work’ was the reply.
Students watching Replay highlights. Picture from University of Edinburgh Image collection. CC BY https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/a93pr4
We are more than two weeks into term now at University of Edinburgh.
My poem:
Lectures are being recorded. The sky has not fallen in. The service is called Replay. Students like it. Staff like it. We are gathering data. The learning technology teams have shown themselves to be expert in the jobs they do. The learning technology teams have shown themselves to be excellent in the jobs they do. I’m not shocked. Well done all.
The conference was really interesting, and quite political. Lots of talk of combatting fake news and a keynote from the ACLU. It was also quite a diverse conference, I thought, and the topic of diversity came up again and again. A lot of people thinking very hard about the sheer scale of getting ‘everyone’ involved in open knowledge.
I mused* on 2 things:
Someone presented some research indicating that women who contribute to Wikipedia do not only edit on ‘women’s topics’ or female biographies. That was not a shock as women, notoriously, are interested in all kinds of topics. But it does mean that getting more female editors does not automatically increase the coverage of our under represented bios.
There was some interesting findings with regard to images. It seems that the images available in Wikimedia Commons to represent people in roles and professions disproportionately portray men in those roles. Even when the profession in question is traditionally female dominated.
Interesting.
The connection between these two I think, must draw upon the same theory of ‘unconscious bias’ as our recruitment training does. Men and women both tend to think that men are more appropriate in professional roles, and more notable for biographies. Unconsciously, even when we pay attention, we may fall foul of our bias.
Much inspired by it all, I return to my main hobby of creating and improving women’s bios. This week I wrote about Prunella Briance, founder of the NCT and Sheila Kitzinger. I felt brave and added a picture of actual breastfeeding to Kitzinger’s page. I think she would have wanted that. Briance, Kitzinger and the NCT fought the good fight to allow women to breastfeed without fear, even in public.
*coincidentally, while I was there I discovered another dead muse, and created a page for Blanche Blackwell.
Common Sense of a wholly new type. https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/y2j4j2 (c) University of Edinburgh. Full Public Access.
Some people have asked if we are going to have subtiles on our lecture recordings as default. The answer is no, but I’d be keen to hear creative ideas on how we could do it. ….. Any ideas which cost less than $3m per year are welcome.
Students with disabilities are, we hope, one of the groups which will most benefit from lecture recording. That is however, quite a diverse group, with a wide range of individual needs, with a variety of existing support in place. Disability Services supported our initial business case with their own papers and contribute to discussions on our policy task group. Accessibility use cases were included in our procurement and selection so we are confident that we chose a good solution from a knowledgeable supplier with a large HE user community.
Our approach is based on being widely flexible and enabling choices of formats and pedagogy. The draft lecture recording policy states that recordings are primarily an additional resource, rather than a substitute for attendance, so the recording and slides provide the ‘alternative format’ to enhance the accessibility of a live-delivered lecture.
Some lecturers’ notes and slides provide considerable text to support the recorded audio. Replay recordings will support a wide range of accessibility and inclusivity needs – visually impaired; dyslexia and other similar; various autism spectrum disorders; students who for a number of mental health reasons may find physical attendance overwhelming; students for whom English is not their first language, those who struggle with complex technical terms or latin translations, those who experience debilitating anxiety as a result of missing classes. Where students have a schedule of adjustments that includes having a scribe in class with them, a recording will help the scribe clarify and areas of subject specific terminology.
We are running training sessions for all staff on how to make accessible PowerPoint presentations, often it is the use of .ppt which has the greatest impact on accessibility. Replay itself includes good keyboard controls for the video player, integration with JAWS screen reader software, tab-accessible page navigation and a high contrast user interface.
Recording lectures will require academic staff to use microphones – we know practice is currently patchy. So the act of making a recording can improve accessibility for those in the room even if they never replay the video. We are also introducing dozens more Catchbox microphones to catch more student contributions in the recording.
The Replay video experiments with chalk boards will considerably enhance accessibility for students at the back of the lecture theatre with the ability to ‘zoom in’.
For students using ISG services our service level is as consistent across all of our learning technologies as we can make it. Replay recordings will be made available in a closed VLE environment, alongside eReserve texts from the library, PDF and Word documents, lecture slides etc. Any of these digital artefacts can be requested in an alternative format as part of supporting reasonable adjustments. In the case of the lecture recording this could be supplying a transcript or subtitles. For other artefacts it could be supplying in a larger font, or converting written text into audio format. We don’t pre-judge what the required adjustment might be in any of these cases.
With regard to transcripts/subtitles specifically:
Our experience is that automated speech to text although improving, is not fully there yet. And costs remain prohibitive, so transcripts or subtitles are not automated in the lecture recording system.
Specialist language in lectures remain tricky and are often subtitled badly. It is also difficult for the transcription to discern whether the lecturer is quoting, reading, muttering or joking. The kind of ‘performance’ and content some of our colleagues deliver would need a highly nuanced translation. All UK HE struggles with this challenge and colleagues are anxious that their speech is not misrepresented by a poor quality subtitle which might be more confusing for learners.
Even supposed ‘100% accurate human-mediated subtitling’ is not 100% and often requires a proof-read or edit from the speaker. In some cases colleagues are willing to take on this extra work, for others it is seen as a major barrier.
That said, we have purchased, as part of our bundle, 100 hours of human-mediated subtitling and transcripts ( 99% accurate) and 900 hours of machine speech to text ( approx. 70% accurate). The current planned use cases for this would be:
• where profoundly deaf students request a transcript;
• where the recordings are not a substitute, but in fact a primary delivery mechanism (e.g distance learning);
• where colleagues are publishing and sharing recordings of their lectures publicly online as open educational resources.
• Where a student with mobility difficulties has been unable to access the venue.
As part of the policy consultation over the coming year we may be able to encourage colleagues to make audio and video recordings downloadable so that students can use their own technology to make transcripts.
For the future:
If, as a result of scaling up recording, we find there is a large additional requirement for transcripts we have a number of options:
• If the institutional commitment to spending is there, we can integrate the third party supplier of our choice. For 50,000 hours of recordings each semester that would be approx $3m per semester.
• We can retain more high quality transcription services. This may need to be recharged to Schools to recover costs – capping costs would be difficult
• We can look into involving more colleagues in using their personalised, trained ‘speech to text’ tools to create transcripts.
• We are working with colleagues in Informatics to stay aware of the most up to date speech to text technologies.
• We can spend much less than $3m per semester paying students an hourly rate to transcribe lectures in their discipline.
University archive colleagues have been incredibly kind and spent time with me looking through his photos. Apparently there is some genuine interest in the history of electron microscopy and molecular biology these days.
The estate of Dr Peter Highton will be happy to donate whatever we have in our cupboards.
