What have our champions learned after taking part in the Learning Capture project? At our showcase, Dr Shixuan Wang and Dr Yueting Cui reflected on their experiences with the YuJa Learning Capture software and shared their top tips. Read on for a flavour!
If you would like to see the presentations, you can watch the showcase online through UoRLearn (requires sign in).
Dr Shixuan Wang is an Associate Professor in Economics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in SPEIR. His research interests include econometric methods, empirical finance, and operations management.
I have always been a ‘tech nerd’ and want to try new technologies. The module I worked with is “Marcoeconometrics,” which is a postgraduate course for both MSc and PhD students. The unique nature of this module is that we will have econometric theories taught in lectures and hand-on programming sessions in computer labs.
Doing learning capturing in a lecture room is straightforward, and TEL has many valuable resources on it. But it is much trickier for my computer-lab sessions, where students have opportunities to practice RStudio (the programming platform we use) to implement all econometric methods they learnt in lectures.
The question is whether there is any part of computer-labs that can be recorded and, more importantly, can they enhance students’ experience. Having a video of demonstration (as a reference) can help students to learn those complicated programming. In terms of the instructor’s perspective, this helps us to save time. When students ask me a particular question, I can refer them to a specific video for all programming details.
Lastly, the question is “does it work”? Based on the students’ feedback, I have happy students that they love the recorded videos of the computer-lab sessions. They have been learning the line-by-line programming in the videos, and most of them are able to generalise them to the coursework. One student even mentioned to me that “watching the recorded video is a better way to learn programming.”
Dr Yueting Cui is a Lecturer in Finance and the Programme Director of MSc Behavioural Finance in the ICMA Centre, Henley Business School. She has published in internationally recognised academic journals and established a collaboration both in academia and industry. These backgrounds provide her the opportunity to teach a large variety of courses in the subject of finance. She believes that designing and delivering inclusive and student-centred programmes, as well as modules is the key to achieve the best teaching and learning experience for students.
Her presentation provided a comparison of YuJa to other learning capture systems in terms of functionality and efficiency. Based on her own experience, YuJa provided not only the benefits screencasting tools but also the seamless connection to Blackboard modules. She considered it more intuitive and effective to upload, edit, manage, and publish videos in just one place. She also presented the YuJa analytics data regarding her tested PG module in the spring term 2022. She demonstrated how to use the historical data to gain the insights of student engagement and shared her tips to create screencasts and live recordings.
Find out more about YuJa through the Learning Capture Homepage.