The move away from transmission-based lecturing toward a more student-centred active learning approach is well evidenced in STEM higher education. However, the examination of active learning has generally remained confined to formal timetabled contexts, with assumptions made that students independently manage the transition between timetabled and…

In this paper we use new experimental data to investigate students' preferences regarding lecture mode and length, and assessment type across two unique dimensions: expected learning and enjoyment. Our main findings are as follows: first, students demonstrate a strong preference against online lectures. Students expect to learn more from, and…

Engaging a large cohort of students with teaching content is a difficult task for any educator working in higher education. When students are not receiving feedback about their participation efforts, this can lead to decreased engagement. Polling activities, such as hands up responses, can be used to address this but students cannot respond…

Lecture Capture (LC) material is accepted to be an available and accessible resource for students in universities across the world. This exploratory study investigates the "when viewing" LC material engagement of accounting undergraduate students. Three categories of engagement are defined, Near-Event-Viewing (NEV), Get-Round-to-Viewing…

With the pivot back to on-campus teaching, many students find themselves in an unfamiliar learning environment: the lecture theatre. This can result in low rates of participation in lectures, especially with a diverse student demographic, including English as an Additional Language students. This can result in exclusion from learning for these…

This article outlines an exploratory study that investigated students' perceptions of the benefits and disadvantages of lecture recordings delivered as part of an introductory chemistry program in the UK during the COVID-19 lockdown in Spring 2020. Three features of these lecture recordings are considered: 1) the production of a series of…

The PowerPoint-assisted lecture (slide-lecture) is a common lecturing approach in higher education, in spite of much criticism of its use. Its popularity is facilitated by its affordances for multimodal instructional design, e.g. text with images and speech. Little is known about the integration of different semiotic modalities within the…

Large-class university lectures remain commonplace, yet their educational value is contested. While the majority of criticism contrasts transmissive lectures with active learning pedagogies, this case study evaluates a lecture series on its intrinsic qualities, looking at staff and student understandings of the lecture's contribution to academic…

The published literature on lecture capture technologies is often conflicting and sometimes controversial. A common thread among many studies is the impact of recorded lectures on student satisfaction, attendance and performance; however, many of these studies fail to acknowledge the wider context and the many and varied ways in which capture…

Authority is one of the most problematic and ambiguous concepts in social and educational theory. Authority is a relation that is based on disparities of knowledge, expertise or experience. Drawing on teaching observations and interviews with undergraduate students and lecturers about their experiences of large-group teaching, I argue that in…

Cambridge undergraduates have regular active-learning opportunities in small-group tutorials, in which they solve problems and discuss ideas based on course material. Would they see any value in performing similar tasks in flipped-classroom settings, or would they regard the introduction of a second active-learning modality as redundant? Following…

This article considers how technologies actively shape the topologies of UK higher education. Using the example of lecture capture systems, we examine the relationship between learning technologies and formations of space and time. Combining theories of sociomateriality and social topology, and concepts of assemblage and relationality, we expose…

This study investigated how repeating a video-lecture-based task affects second language (L2) learners' processing and incidental acquisition of technical vocabulary as well as the relationship between processing and lexical gains. The participants were 75 Chinese learners of L2 English. Thirty participants performed the task once (control group),…

Lecture capture is used increasingly in the UK, and has become a normal feature of higher education. Most studies on the impact of lecture capture have focused on benefits to student learning, the flipped classroom or student non-attendance at lectures following its introduction. It is less clear how the use of lecture capture has impacted on…

This paper explores the benefits and drawbacks of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) to engage undergraduate students in geography modules at Newcastle University. I consider the efficacy of "student response systems" (hereafter SRS, also known as audience response systems, clickers or personal response systems) in large lectures by…