Online lecture recordings and lecture attendance: Investigating student preferences in a large first year psychology course

Abstract

While blended learning has been around for sometime, the interplay between lecture recordings, lecture attendance and grades needs further examination particularly for large cohorts of over 1000 students in 500 seat lecture theatres. This paper reports on such an investigation with a cohort of 1450 first year psychology students’ who indicated whether they frequently attended lectures or not. The division helped ascertain differences and similarities in preferences for utilising online recordings. Overall, non-frequent attendees were more likely not to use lecture recordings (48.1%) to make up a missed lecture than frequent attendees (34.3%). Surprisingly, in the last week of semester, 29% of students reported not yet accessing lecture recordings. Students had the intention to use lecture recordings as they envisaged these to be helpful for learning and commented that they would be adversely affected if recordings were not available. In fact, students are passionate about lecture recordings. Analytics show that after lecture 7, each lecture recording attracted 600 or less unique visits (hits) supporting the finding that most students make strategic use of learning resources available within the blended learning environment.