For the first time in three semesters teaching on-line, I have forgotten to record an on-line class. I had some announcements to make at the beginning of class last evening which I deliberately excluded from a recording. But after 15 minutes of this I completely forgot to click the record button in Adobe Connect. It was only at the very end of the class when I went to switch off recording that I noticed it was never on. All this while I have a Post-It right under my webcam lens. D'oh!
I have a recording of this class from previous semesters. It is actually quite awkward to reuse this recording. While it is stored on my Moodle page, it is not available as an MP4. I cannot simply save the video to a file - I have to play the video in full, and it creates a recording while doing this. I can't edit anything while this is going on, so my class recording is quietly playing in the background as I write.
I may not be allowed use this recording as we have a rule that recordings cannot be shared - I'm checking on this today. But I'd like to pose a question: Is is appropriate/useful to provide a recording from one class to another? We use Adobe Connect for virtual classes, so students can see who else is logged on, and they can see all their questions and comments in the chat box. Viewing a video from another class will be different - for example, while content should be very much the same, I will certainly not say the same things, or answer the same questions, or even do things in the same order. The chat box will also be different. I accept that watching a video from another class is better than nothing for an on-line student who has missed a class - but you could then extend this to why not allow it to be shared to other classes?
Some lecturers go ahead and share their classes on-line anyway. A good example of this is Professor Andy Field's series of lectures on statistics - anybody can watch them on YouTube for free. Some lecturers may reuse recordings and make them available to a class, but I re-record each time. This is the third time I have taught the Programming for Big Data module, and there will have been three separate sets of recordings made.
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