The May 2021 Faculty Forum Recording is Now Available

Dear Faculty Colleagues, 

Thanks to all of you who joined us on May 21 for our Faculty Forum on our uses, challenges, and successes with lecture capture at UC Davis. The recording of the event is available now.

Faculty who used lecture capture shared how they came to use this tool in their teaching. Their motivation mainly was to make the content available to the students who miss the class, or to allow students to revisit lectures when they had difficulty understanding lecture content. For example, Dr. Julia Chamberlain, Assistant Professor of Teaching at the Department of Chemistry, sought to create and reuse content in multiple classes, while for Dr. Miriam Martin, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, sought to provide usable content for the students for whom English is not their native language. 

Faculty acknowledged different comfort levels and expertise in usage of the lecture capture technologies and techniques. Professor Simon Sadler, Chair of the Design Department, reached out to the Lecture Capture team right when all his colleagues were transitioning to remote teaching. Empowered, Dr. Sadler felt he could meet his own expectations of organization and professionalism by lecturing to his students from actual campus classrooms. 

Dr. Laci Gerhart-Barley, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Evolution and Ecology, indicated that she adroitly used the tool in her large classes long before the pandemic. Gerhart-Barley posited that the practice of recording her lectures freed up time in her office hours to more deeply dive into class topics. If students had questions about the content, they knew they could return to the lecture. With the help of AggieVideo, she organized her lectures, broke them into digestible chunks that were searchable based on the topic. Such videos became resources for multiple classes.

Lecture Capture lead Jeremy Cooke shared that rooms with full video capture come equipped with a motorized camera that can be remotely operated by the staff. The video recording is combined with a capture of screen content like presentation slides and audio from the instructor’s microphone. The recorded content is subsequently provided to the professor via AggieVideo. Cooke also noted that some lecture capture rooms without cameras can still record audio and screen content.

At the conclusion of the conversation, event host Dr. Andy Jones promised that Lecture Capture would return as a topic at this year’s remote Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology, scheduled for September 9th and 10th. You have until Tuesday, June 1st to submit your short proposal. Plan to join us for that event!

Academic Technology Services offers DOLCE (Discussing Online Learning and Collaborative Education) on the first Friday of every month, and Faculty Forums on the third Friday of the month during the school year. Please join us on June 4 for our last DOLCE of the quarter to enjoy faculty presentations on a variety of topics.

If you have questions about Instructional Design at UC Davis, please contact our ATS senior instructional designers at instructionaldesign@ucdavis.edu.

Best,

Dr. Andy Jones
Academic Associate Director, Academic Technology Services
Editor in Chief of The Wheel: The Instructional Technology Blog of UC Davis
University of California, Davis