Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Paul Newbury et al.
mobile devices. Care has to be taken to ensure the originating audio and video are synchronised.
Video processing and routing systems can delay video, making it late with respect to the audio output.
Therefore an audio delay is added to resynchronise before transcoding.
User interactions are fed back to a separate interaction-server by both the desktop web browser and
a dedicated mobile app (interactions in web-based mobile video is currently limited). The interactionserver
feeds data directly into the live production environment where it can be automatically managed
or manually dealt with.
Figure 9: Live stream delivery framework
Student engagement often suffers if key lectures are missed which makes it hard for them to absorb
the taught material following that lecture even if they have access to the slides and notes. This
research found that students who do not physically attend a lecture but watch it live online or later
from a recording receive a very similar experience to those who do attended. The issue of attendance
is covered in section 3.4.
3. Pilot study - measurement of student interaction with capture material
The purpose of this pilot study is to measure student interaction with different types of recorded digital
content, in an attempt to discern the effect of the capture method on the student interaction with
recorded material. The participating classes are taken from the last three years of a level two
Multimedia Systems course, where the capture method has been different for each cohort. The initial
cohort (2007/08) was provided with online digital copies of lecture slides in .pdf and .ppt formats,
using the University’s Moodle-based course management system (StudyDirect). The following year
(2008/09) lectures were timetabled in the Media Technology Lab (Figure 5), where a full multi-camera
live edit recording could be made and provided online to the students (Figure 7). The live recording
framework outlined in section 2.2 and the delivery mechanism described in section 2.3 were used. In
the final year of the pilot study (2009/10) lectures took place in a standard lecture theatre, but were
recorded using the ECHO360 system and delivered using StudyDirect (Figure 2). The material for all
three years of this course was constructed in line with the materials development structure set out in
section 2.1.
As cohorts differ in size, makeup and aptitude between years it is hard to make definite claims about
student interaction from one cohort to the next. However, it is generally considered that qualitative
student feedback and download rates provide an insight into the student engagement with the
recorded material (Bradley 2009, Day 2006). Thus this paper assesses students’ interaction using the
following 3 key criteria:
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