By Cheryl Ekstrom (LinkedIn)

March 2020 saw a steep learning curve as teachers everywhere scrambled to learn new technologies to continue their classes in a new online format. If the theme of Spring 2020 was “Let’s just finish what we started as best we can,” the theme for Fall 2020 seemed to be “Design your now-online class to the level you are comfortable with online tools, in the hopes that Fall 2019 returns soon.” But then something amazing happened: once instructors were no longer struggling with online tools in Spring 2021, they began to re-evaluate how they used their class time and started asking questions like “How can I use the technologies at my disposal to make a more meaningful impact?”

Now that many people are vaccinated, there is a hope that we all go back to “life as normal.” However, that technology cat is out of the bag now, and some of the things we have been doing in the last year and a half should not be forgotten just because our classes are starting to be held in-person again. In fact, some practices should become a regular standard for all college classes. Namely, the practice of recording each class session should become a standard in every class.

Making a case for recording class sessions

In an informal survey of 800+ students across all levels of math at UArizona in May 2020, 92.8% responded that having course documents/recordings posted online after the transition to online learning helped their individual learning. And in a free response question asking “After the transition to remote learning, what aspects of your math class supported your learning?,” many students responded with statements about the posted video recording of the classes, completely unprompted. Specific examples are cited below each reason for continuing to record classes:

• Accessibility: A recording of what happened in class can be paused and replayed at will. This alone makes your class more accessible. Add in the captioning properties of most video playback systems (with edits, of course) and you have accommodated many of the disabilities commonly encountered.

  • “Being able to watch pre-recorded lectures because I was able to pause when I wanted to, which helped me learn better by having the ability to move at my own pace.”

  • “The recorded lectures are by far the most beneficial. This provided me the ability to rewatch and go over concepts that are missed in class. This also provides the chance to learn the concepts if you were too afraid to ask in class.”

  • “The class recordings allowed me to go back and go slower through the content.”

• Review and Clarification: By recording your class and posting the video to your learning management system, you are allowing students to review the notes they have taken, and clarify the areas where they may have been rushed, or fix areas of miscopied information.

  • “I was able to go back and watch specific moments from class multiple times due to the recordings.”

  • “Posting recorded lectures allowed for replay to create more thorough notes and study for exams, very helpful.”

  • “Posting recorded lectures for later review. It made studying really easy, and I could rewatch portions of the videos to improve my notes, rework problems, and see new concepts multiple times.”

• Reduce Anxiety: Knowing that a recording of the class will be available later greatly reduces student anxiety.

  • “Being outside of the in-person classroom setting, which gives me anxiety troubles, helped me handle my stress levels better. I also found that the extra resources and recordings of the live lectures helped me understand the material better on my own.”

  • “There were some benefits too, like the general anxiety of in-class lectures and having to stop a lecture to ask a question in a giant room of 200+ people was eliminated with zoom questions.”

• Allows students to be more “present” during class time: Often students are so busy writing down everything that’s on the board, they don’t even listen or try to process what’s going on. By recording your classes, students can really engage in class, work through the examples, and know that they can take notes later.

  • “I was more inclined to go back and rewatch the recorded lecture if I forgot something rather than looking it up and teaching myself.”

  • “Because the lectures were recorded, I could listen to them repeatedly, which is good because my auditory processing isn't always reliable. This specifically meant I could watch the lectures once, not taking notes and just focusing on understanding the concepts, then watch the lecture again, taking notes. With lectures in real time only, I would get so distracted writing things down that I would miss things being said in the lecture.”

• Solution for students who miss class: We have all heard it: “I was out last class….did I miss anything?” If the class is recorded, the students will know exactly what they missed. As much as we want our students to take attendance seriously, we also want them to feel comfortable saying, “I don’t feel well this morning, and I don’t want to risk spreading germs.” If we are serious about our advice to students during this pandemic and we want them to stay at home if they show any symptoms of COVID, then we need to make them feel comfortable about missing the class meeting. Providing a recording is a great first step (bonus points if you can run the Zoom session simultaneously for students to join and participate from home!).

  • “Being able to watch the recordings of the lecture is really nice, in case I miss a lecture for some reason.”

  • “I really liked being able to go back to any given lesson and refresh myself on the content. I just felt a lot more relaxed having the recorded lectures there if for some reason I was sick or missed a day.

How to record class sessions

There are three methods for providing video recordings to your students

1. Make a video library accessible. Thanks to the pandemic and a year and a half of online classes, many of us already have great material recorded. With a little trimming and editing of permissions, you can make these recordings from the past year available to your current students. This means you do not need to worry about recording live in your current class, which is easier. It also means you will probably be spending some time editing the old videos: making them bite-size chunks, naming them appropriately, editing out student names if necessary.

2. Video capture your classes from your classroom this term. One good thing the pandemic did for us at UArizona was force a tech upgrade in almost every single classroom. Minimally, each classroom has a classroom computer from which you can launch Zoom or Panopto, and a document camera and webcam to easily capture natural handwriting on paper and the instructor’s voice. If you are used to writing on the board, this will be an adjustment. But the document camera is easily fed to the Zoom/Panopto recording, as well as to the classroom projector so that every seat in the classroom can easily view it.

3. Video capture from Zoom, AND allow students to join remotely. This is taking Option 2 one step further. If you are recording with Zoom anyway, you might as well allow students who cannot attend in person to join online. This is not easy, and it will probably require a helper (student in your classroom or TA) to help monitor the Zoom chat while you are presenting. However, this will make your class the most accessible, and thus be the most rewarding.

Please do not let us go back to the pre-pandemic days of only presenting on blackboards, without thought of making classes accessible to all. We have the technology now. Let’s use it! As one student noted in the survey previously mentioned,

The recorded lectures are great. I think recorded lectures should be the standard even after everything is normal again.

Cheryl Ekstrom joined UArizona math as instructional faculty in 2003 where she taught for 10 years. She now provides academic support to teaching faculty, specializing in digital tools and online learning. She believes that all done in the classroom may be done online—it may just look a little different.