Screencasting for postgraduate assessment

Mel Lindley Lead for Technology-Enhanced Learning

Nicky Snowdon Team Leader and Senior Lecturer in Physiotherapy

Programme Context

MSc Advancing Physiotherapy Practice

• The overarching aim of the programmes is to advance clinical, therapeutic and reflective skills and empower students to facilitate service development and the enablement of service users

• Much stronger focus on recommended route through the programme

• Modules delivered either face-to-face or distance learning

Module Context

• Aim– To develop advanced clinical assessment and reasoning

skills, problem identification and goal setting.

• Delivery– Structured content, synchronous and asynchronous

discussions, formative activities & feedback– short timeframe

• Assessment– Presentation and viva

Student support

Student choice Chosen format Numbers of students

Screencast7

PowerPoint with separate audio3

PowerPoint with audio clips attached1

Articulate1

• Students chose what felt familiar, from previous experience and from watching presentations on the module.

• One student believed a camera would be required so did not attempt to screencast.

• No students chose to video themselves.

Familiarity with screencasting

• Most had no prior experience of screencasting– one international student had used QuickTime before– one UK student chose Articulate because he used it as a

university lecturer.

• One student took two 'takes' and one three 'takes'. However, most students described many, many 'takes'.

• Main reason for multiple takes was managing the time limit imposed by the module.

Student perspectives

• Easy to set-up and use.

– One student, who works in a UK rural setting, is now using screencasting for their staff in-service training.

• Liked to see the cursor moving on the slide

• Worried more about the presentation than would have done with a "face-to-face" presentation?

• Didn't like listening to own voice!

Staff perspectives

• Great to listen more than once - and to pause the play-back to write notes!

– may have enabled more details to be noted than in the face-to-face presentation

• The various formats were equally easy to watch and mark.

• No problems with file size - largest screencast was recorded on QuickTime (42MB), other screencasts were 19 - 23 MB.

Parity vs. replication

• Correlation between format and module mark – module internally moderated so not biased towards

screencast– does the format better enable students to demonstrate

their learning?• Should we be concerned that the DL presentation is not

done in real time?– are we too obsessed with replicating a f2f experience

rather than celebrating the differences ?

..... there's more than one to skin a cat

Any questions, feedback or suggestions?