Lecture-Capture: The Early Qatar Experience

To the Editor. We read with great interest the article, ‘‘Impact of Online Lecture-capture on Student Outcomes in a Therapeutics Course.’’¹ We commend the authors for exploring this ancillary teaching technology and attempting to assess its impact on student outcomes, including course grades and class attendance.

We believe a number of their findings merit comment. While the authors demonstrated that final examination scores were higher in the study group, use of historic controls threatens the validity of this comparison, as confounding factors such as course modifications, differences among student cohorts in scholastic ability, and related factors were not formally considered. We were not surprised to learn that the investigators were unable to identify a relationship between accession volume and final course grades, because access is only 1 variable that will determine academic performance, and both academically strong and weak students would be expected to access lecture-capture materials.

In 2008, Qatar University College of Pharmacy implemented lecture-capture across all pharmacy courses to support the introduction of a new Canadian-accredited BSc(Pharm) program. We now employ Echo360 media platform (Echo360, Dulles, VA) to record audio, video, and computer/data camera images for all regularly scheduled classes, continuing education sessions, and faculty research/professional development seminars. Links to captured lectures are posted to the course Web site on Blackboard Academic Suite (Blackboard, Inc, Washington, DC), our online course management system, within 24 hours of the activity, and these links remain available for the duration of the semester. Upon completion of the course, the links (and all course materials) are archived and remain accessible to all pharmacy students (including students from other professional years) until graduation. Preliminary analysis of our course accessions reveals that students tend to revisit lectures within a few days of delivery to clarify concepts raised during the lecture, and prior to scheduled learning assessments. It is unfortunate that investigators chose to provide their lecture-capture materials for 72 hours only, and this could explain partially the apparent lack of influence of this learning/teaching method on final course grades found in this study. We believe providing students with the ability to return to lectures and courses previously delivered, as well as to look ahead at future courses, promotes curricular transparency, help students appreciate relationships among the courses they are taking and the overall study plan, and reinforces their understanding of how we strive to advance their knowledge, skills, and attitudes over the tenure of the 5-year degree program.

The authors rightly point out concerns associated between truancy and the availability of lecture recordings. At Qatar, class sizes are small (≤ 25 students), and attendance is considered mandatory. Students receive a participation grade for each course, which is reduced for nonattendance. Despite the availability of lecture-capture postings over the past 2 years, absenteeism in our college is low and has not been influenced by the implementation of lecture capture. Our lecture-capture materials, available for review in perpetuity, are considered a resource to augment the classroom experience and have additional utility in our English-language program, as students' first language is Arabic. We also were surprised that the authors report that most of their students declared watching entire 2-hour lectures, a pattern of usage not demonstrated by our students. Instead, our students tend to select the specific content within each lecture for review purposes. We would be interested to learn whether these full-lecture accessions were attributed to nonattendance of the specific classes.

While not discussed by the investigators, lecture-capture has benefits beyond that of being a student-learning augmentation tool. At Qatar, all course materials, including the associated lecture-capture links, are made accessible to all full-time faculty members via our course management software, which facilitates course and lecture planning, improves content sequencing, and reduces redundant and/or possibly contradictory lecture content delivery. Additionally, lecture-capture files provide an opportunity for professional development for faculty members by permitting “virtual” attendance of fellow faculty lectures, research seminars, and continuing education events.

Lecture-capture also has been incorporated into our peer teaching assessment and academic promotion processes. These represent a more naturalistic sample of classroom teaching performance than attendance of evaluators at prearranged sessions, so we incorporate a mixture of both for the purpose of assessment and continuous improvement. Finally, we intend to employ our lecture-capture content for the purposes of supporting distance-based education in our future part-time doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) program.

In summary, over 2 years of experience with lecture capture in an international pharmacy degree program has revealed benefits to students, faculty members, and the college in general. We are undertaking some direct quantitative and qualitative assessments of lecture-capture to confirm our empirical observations. We encourage others to consider the adoption of this teaching and learning tool as well.

Kerry Wilbur, PharmD
Peter Jewesson, PhD
College of Pharmacy Qatar University