Case study: The challenges and accessibility opportunities of pre-recorded lecture content

Department of Archaeology
Penny Spikins

Penny Spikins reflects on her experiences of recording pre-recorded lecture content during the remote teaching phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with those of her students. She highlights how she used audio description and ‘podcasting’ approaches to meet the needs of different students in her cohorts including those with disabilities, and to stimulate thinking and engagement with students in different ways.

Watch their presentation:

The challenges and opportunities of pre-recorded lecture content (Panopto viewer) (13 mins 58 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about my experience of developing pre-recorded lectures with certain accessibility challenges. So it goes without saying, doesn't it, that we faced enormous challenges this year going from something like this, which we now think of as like, you know, quite out-of-date and traditional to something like this. And for me, it's been quite important to think about what's actually changing. We are certainly losing something. We're losing that proximity, um, of being near to other people. And we're also facing something of the theatre of a lecture. So, yeah, probably like many of the rest of you. I usually talk about something topical that's in the news. There's a great sense of interactivity. You can really sense whether people have understood everything or not, as well as allowing them to ask questions.

And this is a new format. But there are some things that we're gaining. And those were the things I kind of wanted to think about. Some of those things are obvious. That's about people being able to learn at their own pace. We know that about online materials, but other things I think are a little less obvious and perhaps equally, if not maybe even more important. We begin to escape from the tyranny of the one hour or two hour lecture slot. There's a little bit more flexibility there around breaking topics up into chunks that are easier to understand that are not sort of squashed or rushed or extended around a really set length, but much more than that. I find when we're sitting in a lecture room amongst a crowd of people, we never have that ability to explore, to imagine, to really relax and feel safe within the ideas we're being exposed to because we're too conscious of all relationships with other people, what we look like, the impressions that we're giving. And some other formats, and I love listening to podcasts, give us a chance to actually pause and imagine and sort of escape into our own opinions much better than a rigid lecture does.

So with these things in mind, I had certain challenges and opportunities to face in developing my own resources. So one challenge is obviously the workload. I think many of us have really experienced that. And I'm not sure that I can suggest any way of solving that one. But my research area is human origins. So that means I'm always on first. I do the early stuff and I have courses at first year, second year, third year and master's level in autumn term. That meant preparing over 2000 minutes of pre-recorded content, of which 600 was new because new pre-recorded lectures had to be created to accommodate changes. And that's just autumn time. So there is a lot to do.

We're losing interactivity. As I said before. But added to that. I am I'm particularly interested and involved in disability. And I was delighted to have a series of new Masters students, many of whom had some quite severe disabilities, which meant they couldn't attend. And included within that was one blind student and a hearing impaired student. And to add to that mix I have dyslexia. That means that perfect lectures in which everything comes out right all the time and some sort of perfect pre-recorded lecture is never, ever going to happen because I never quite say exactly the right thing. So when it comes to the recording itself, often people feel we need to do some sort of perfect thing, and I'm probably never going to achieve that.

Nevertheless, there are also some opportunities here. The one we've already said students can work at their own pace, but also we can be a little bit creative. We're escaping the lecture room for another whole format that we can think about and work our own way through. And I was particularly interested in creating pre-recorded lectures as a sort of safe space to explore or think creatively or be imaginative. So students could stop and think about things and almost in the safety of their room or if they're listening to it while they're walking around, they can allow their minds to wander in a way we often don't find we are able to do in a lecture.

So putting that together, I decided to develop something more of a podcast style. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't visuals. I didn't really mean that. What I mean is that there's a concentration on describing the visual, which I have to do, but using that visual description as part of a way of drawing people in becoming part of a story describing my own experience of images or concepts in the way that we see much more frequently on radio, where they're also trying to get through the challenges of the media by drawing people in in certain imaginative ways. Obviously there’s the captions to do. But also I wanted to encourage students to feel that they could and if they wanted to listen to my lecture material as a podcast because I'm accommodating a student who's blind, I don't want to do different things for all the different courses. I want to just do everything the same way all the way across, then actually listening as a podcast, getting out there, getting some exercise, doing something different, doing your washing up, whatever it is, should work for everybody.

So. Well, how did it go? Well, I think I developed a style as I went through really. So I started using the same kind of lecture that I might have used before. But just adding more of that visual story. So, for example, for this one, um, there's a initial image of what looks just like a sort of piece of unremarkable stone. And I'll start by saying something like .. I'm looking at a really unremarkable stone today. You might pick that up off a beach and and just never even think twice about it. It's sort of looks like a cobble, it's got pieces that are taken off it. We can see where a few flakes have been removed, but we might not notice it very much. However, this is a stone artefact. It's probably more than 2.5 million years old. And whoever made it probably doesn't really fit with any of our categorisations or classifications of human. This is something a bit different. So this unremarkable object might tell us about the mind of something that perhaps comes out of science fiction. So, as you say, draw people in. Describe the visual. And it feels a little bit more podcast like.

I'm lucky, of course, because many of the issues I talk about to do with human origins are also about our story. It's about asking questions. Did Neanderthals die out because of horrible virulent diseases. So relevant to today. What about other issues of what made our species successful? And they're all things that in some ways the lecture format prevents us from being imaginative about and thinking of our own opinions about and this format gave people those opportunities. And I developed, as I went along to reduce drastically the text on the slides. The previous text I showed you has got more text on it than any I've I've been creating so far this year. I have much less text on the slides because I'm encouraging students to use the captions. The text is on the captions. They can just use the captions file if they want to. so there's no real need to write anything down.... and very simple images that work on a smartphone.

And actually that kind of style works much better around simple concept. So I, I really don't know. But I have the impression that rather than being in a lecture where you're distracted by looking at the lecturer, you're looking at the slides and the text on the slides, and you're also looking at images on the sides. In this case, you're looking at images. The images are being described very often. Which gives you sort of pause and you're using one part of your brain. And then there's ideas and you have a chance to use that part of the brain. Whatever the reason, we found that understanding and knowledge seemed to really, increase by having this slightly different, more imaginative format and broken up format. So. I've gotten ahead of myself, of course, and this is all part of the style in which nothing is perfect and it perhaps doesn't matter.

What do the students think? Well, I've only really got feedback from my second years because we've had a point at which we've taken feedback for them. Certainly in a formal way. But first I asked them in classes what they thought. And actually, it's been overwhelmingly positive. I'm not going to go through all these because I know you're on Panopto so you can pause if you want to read everything. But they certainly seem to really appreciate the opportunities to be able to podcast and just listen to the lectures without needing to look at the visual things. If they didn't want to. But some of them were very much visual learners. They preferred the slides and they were both there as opportunities. The captions they absolutely loved. The captions are really useful. Some of them said, I hadn't seen the captions. I'm going to be using them from now on. So all of those elements worked really well and I like the fact that none of the sections were longer than 20 minutes. In fact, there was this I found your lectures easier to engage with than in other modules. So that was really interesting. And the same message came out in the official feedback assessment. The way the module was adapted was fantastic. The lectures were really interesting. I enjoyed learning about the content. So there was I sort of 100 percent positive feedback on the lectures and lecture material and some great comments as well. Lectures really engaging and well put together. Easy to watch and learn from. And in fact, they I rather enjoyed. I really enjoyed this block and I am sad to see it behind us.

So it's really I it was having spent the summer talking into a void, as we all did, and trying to imagine the people who were there, much as we might do on radio. And I have had a reasonable experience of radio. So that kind of imagining who's behind the camera. It was really nice to actually be teaching and to get that feedback back and to see the sort of benefits the students felt from it. Of course, it could be that it is the pandemic itself that people love the more exploratory theme and particularly human origins right now because it's about them and they want time to explore. And perhaps in a busier social life, they this format might not be quite as exciting for everyone, but certainly I felt that bringing it together. Pedagogically, the flipped classroom we know works well. And here I'm just talking about the lecture format. But everyone across our department noticed improvements in knowledge and understanding, and having the time to look through the resources.

But of course, I'm not just interested in that. I'm wondering how much people have been able to be inspired despite not being in a big lecture room and not having the interactivity. I found that it was actually quite fun and rewarding, way too much work. We we all know that, but fun and rewarding to do and quite creative. I really enjoyed that. Most importantly for me, there were new opportunities for accessibility by developing materials that worked across a range of disabilities and worked well and inspired imagination. Whether you were just looking at that text and not listening or whether you were just listening and not looking at the text that worked across all of that, which I really, really enjoyed. So I also felt that in some ways this had an element of being personal, a different personal than in lectures, but a certain type of personal. And I did feel that students were more interactive. This was more their knowledge that they'd explored than perhaps they had been before.

Well, with this kind of style Will it last? I hope so, because I really enjoy the kind of podcast style production of lectures. And I enjoy the accessibility. So I’d really like to sort of carry that on in future.