Investigation of learning capture

Kirsten Hawkins and Nicola D’Alessandro

This UROP project was a little bit different, this project required two students myself and Nicola to carry it out it was only a short project initially 4 weeks but extended to 5. The project was running alongside the GRASS project and was looking into learning capture techniques used across the whole of the campus. Learning capture is a very broad term to describe different e-learning and teaching methods such as podcasts, screencasts, videofeed back and pen casts.

In this project our supervisors provided Nicola and I with a starter list with a few names of academic staff that we could interview about learning capture techniques they have been using. Each interview lasted about 20 minutes, and we would discuss what they were doing, why they decided to use it, how they were doing it, any future expansion of techniques to be used and any problems that they had with the learning capture technique they were practicing. When we were carrying out the interviews more names were revealed to us. The interview process continued at the end of the five weeks we managed to collect and interview about 40 people of which 26 were interviewed.

In addition to interviews, an audit was sent out to departments in the university with some of the questions that we would be asking in the interviews to allow academic staff to approach us if they so wished. Another form of identifying learning capture practitioners was using survey monkey to send out a small questionnaire to students, to capture the widest student body we posted the survey through social media sites and had the help of RUSU.

To present our findings we were asked to produce a concise report as well as create and develop our own section on the GRASS blog site. The aim of our sections was to show examples of the different learning capture techniques and briefly describe how they were made and why. This is what we created: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/grass/learning-capture-2/