Welcome to, Accessible Lecture Capture

“I am delighted to inform you that your application to be an Echo360 Champion was successful. We had a number of very strong applications, but yours was selected because of the relevance of your study, your shared background in educational practice, and your advocacy for Echo360 in recent months.”

Dr John Couperthwaite, EMEA Customer Success Manager, Echo 360

In May 2021 I was very happy to hear from Dr Couperthwaite that my application to be an Echo 360 Academic Champion for City, University of London was successful. The champion programme began in 2018 and is now an established route to engage with users of lecture capture in Higher Education.

As an advocate of lecture capture to enhance learning for many years the role offered an opportunity to share the work City’s  academic and professional services staff are doing through projects such as the Designing Active Learning Initiative (DALI), Inclusive Synchronous Learning Activities (ISLA) and Growing Access To Lecture Capture (GALA) and to join the community of 2021 Champions to benefit from their peer support for my personal project as Echo 360 awards a project grant to each Champion.

My personal project, what inspired me?

Lecture capture is often promoted as a means to make learning more accessible and inclusive and our research project, Learning from Video and Multimedia (2019) and a Student Union Survey on Lecture Capture (2019) confirmed this and explained much more about how our students use lecture capture. It resulted in further investment to enable lecture capture in all our core learning spaces by the end of 2021 including lecture theatres, seminar rooms and PC labs. This project builds on this achievement and takes note of the importance of working in collaboration with staff and students.

However another project I began working on in 2020, City’s Digital Accessibility Project,  has required me to review the digital accessibility of multimedia platforms and content. I came to examine lecture capture from the  perspective of the Public Sector Body Accessibility Regulations (PBSR) and wondered  just how accessible it was for users of assistive technology who may have a disability or be neurodiverse?

This role gives me the remit to look beyond the obvious benefits a recording provides and to establish from examples of student experience how and where to focus our efforts to ensure greater accessibility and to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Many  in HE are currently working towards this aim and a recent publication by JISC colleagues Kellie Moate and John Kelly on the area of video captioning and accessibility regulations, proposes we in HE focus our efforts where we can most make a difference.

An early focus group with City’s student digital assistants, who use assistive technology to study and who study from lecture capture recordings proved enlightening and has helped shape the project design.

My aim then is to use this Champion role to act as a connecting bridge between the two strategic initiatives that I am currently engaged with, the one to enable lecture capture across all our learning spaces and the other is the Digital Accessibility project ( 2020 – 2023) which has already seen moves to make our multimedia platforms and content more accessible. I hope one outcome is to be able to make recommendations to City’s Digital Accessibility Working Group (DAWG) on where to focus our efforts and resources when improving the digital accessibility of lecture capture and all recorded teaching.

Project Research Title: What really makes a difference for learning from accessible lecture capture?

My project will run from July to December 2021 and will fund a student team to review, explore and report on how different features available in Echo 360 (City’s lecture capture platform) impact on their learning from lecture capture.

The following areas are of interest to me and I hope to you too, please let me know if there is anything else that it would be useful to investigate.

• The experience of learning from lecture capture recordings as an assistive technology and combined with other assistive technologies e.g. note taking, captions, transcripts
• The media player features e.g. speed settings, note taking, flags
• Interactive transcript use, caption options, word search, transcript options, Automated Speech Recognition and corrected captions
• The use of active learning tools in lecture rooms and theatres
• The signposting of lecture capture via Moodle
• The impact of the camera view and use of the camera angle controls
• The use of live streaming

Keep updated on my Accessible Lecture Capture project?