Automatic Lecture Recording

Lecture recording has become a very common tool to provide students with additional media for their examination preparations. While its effort has to stay reasonable, only a very basic way of recording is done in many cases. Therefore, watching the resulting videos can get very boring completely independent of how interesting the original topic or session was. This thesis proposes a new approach to lecture recordings by letting distributed computers emulate the work of a human camera team, which is the natural way of creating attractive recordings. This thesis is structured in six chapters, starting with the examination of the current situation, and taking its constraints into account. The first chapter concludes with a reflection on related work. Chapter two is about the design of our prototype system. It is deduced from a human camera team in the real world which gets transferred into the virtual world. Finally, a detailed overview about all parts necessary for our prototype and their planned functionality is given. In chapter three, the implementation of all parts and tasks and the incidents occurring during implementation are described in detail. Chapter four describes the technical experiences made with the different parts during development, testing and evaluation with a view to functionality, performance, and an proposal towards future work. The evaluation of the whole system with students is presented and discussed in the fifth chapter. Chapter six concludes this thesis by summing up the facts and gives an outlook on future work

Analysis of Digital Media: Supporting University-Wide Online Learning via Moodle

This report aims to provide an overview of a project which explores teaching and learning within a blended mode of study. Specifically, it looks to analyse the production of digital media and online social networking with a view to enhancing the learning experience. It was the overall aim of the project to contribute to the University’s Learning and Teaching Strategy by developing media content; exploring the production process, analyse digital participation and explore the challenges and opportunities locally within schools. The project has placed emphasis on the production principles which enhance our online courses whilst providing a consistent quality of experience – recognising that our students often access course material produced by staff from across schools and colleges

Measuring the Affordances of Studying in a Virtual World

There has been much interest at the University of Hertfordshire in the teaching and learning in virtual worlds such as Second Life. The School of Computer Science has established a virtual campus within this system where a broad range of learning and teaching activities take place. These include presenting textual, audio and video learning and teaching materials, delivering virtual lectures, providing simulations and group working areas. Recently there has been a great deal of controversy over such initiatives, for example at my own university lecturers are divided as to the efficacy of such an approach. Some see the initiative as an interesting addition to the range of teaching and learning strategies available, likely to motivate learners. Others see it as a trivial attempt to jump on the latest band wagon, with little pedagogical benefit or justification. My own past research in this area, over several years has related to an estimation of the cognitive load imposed by desktop virtual environments and how this affected learning. Several important variables have been identified in several years of research and their effects measured. In the study presented here, a group of 80 final year computer science students used the Second Life virtual environment in order to support their practical project work. Groups of four learners used the university virtual campus especially modified for this purpose to hold meetings and to manage their software development projects. This study reports on how the group areas were established and used by the learners, the types of activities that took place and the effectiveness of the approach in this context. Quantitative and qualitative research was undertaken and it was found that there were benefits to be had by the use of such virtual environments. Recommendations are made as to the affordances of the Second Life virtual environment for teaching and learning in this context and also discussed are the potential problems inherent in this initiative related to individual differences and the cognitive burden imposed on learners.Peer reviewe

User-centered development of a Virtual Research Environment to support collaborative research events

This paper discusses the user-centred development process within the Collaborative Research Events on the Web (CREW) project, funded under the JISC Virtual Research Environments (VRE) programme. After presenting the project, its aims and the functionality of the CREW VRE, we focus on the user engagement approach, grounded in the method of co-realisation. We describe the different research settings and requirements of our three embedded user groups and the respective activities conducted so far. Finally we elaborate on the main challenges of our user engagement approach and end with the project’s next steps

The Future Affordances of Digital Learning and Teaching within The School of Education

This report illustrates the discussion outcome on digital education within the University of Glasgow School of Education. It is not a strategy document but it does explore the conditions for nurturing digital culture and how these can be channelled into a strategy on digital learning and teaching. The report is based on a review of literature and on a number of local, national and international case study vignettes

iPod therefore I am: Using PC Videos to Aid the Teaching of the History of Political Philosophy

This article outlines our experiences at the University of Huddersfield of (a) producing and using mini-lectures on the history of political philosophy that were available to students as MP4 and progressive download PC video files (and MP3 audio files), and (b) the student feedback on these files which will help future development. This article largely avoids pedagogical issues regarding the use of technology in teaching and focuses more on student feedback and use of these technologies, along with practical issues regarding the production and hosting of these teaching tools