The Canterbury `Digital Lectures' System

This series of web pages accompany the paper `Flexible Delivery Damaging to Learning? Lessons from the Canterbury Digital Lectures Project'.

The purpose of these pages is to demonstrate how the users interact with our system.

The figure below shows a screen-dump of the system at the start of a lecture presented in the course COSC110 on the 15th of September, 2000. The Lecture theatre seats four-hundred students.  A cameraperson in a separate audio-visual room at the back of the lecture theatre recorded the lecture using a digital camera. The lecturer (Dr Tim Bell) wears a lapel radio-microphone, and this audio signal is recorded on the video.
The hypertextual index is created by an assistant immediately after the lecture. The complete `digital lecture' package (video-stream, audio-stream, hypertextual index and user interface) is then burnt onto CDs which are available for students to use in the university library.

In the following pages, we show some of the potentially beneficial uses of the system. As readers of the paper will be aware, however, these potential benefits appeared to be outweighed by unexpected negative aspects of making digital lectures available.
 

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