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Online recordings of lectures provide students with anytime-anyplace access to lectures. Research shows that students prefer courses accompanied by online recordings and an increasing number of universities provide recorded lectures. This paper presents the results of a study into the use of recorded lectures at two universities in the Netherlands. The goal of the study is to gain a better understanding of the way that this group of students use recorded lectures. This understanding will enable the creation of usage scenarios that need to be supported. Our results show that students use recorded lectures as a replacement for missed lectures and for study tasks, like preparing for an exam. A large proportion of the students report that they watch 75100% of a recorded lecture when the view one. The fact that students did not mention the quality of the actual lectures appears not to influence the use of the recorded lectures. Recorded lectures for courses that only use the blackboard are viewed less often. There are also interesting differences in the use of recorded lectures of the different groups of students at the two universities. To increase the credibility and validity of the results, we need a more direct way to measure the use of recorded lectures by students. Methodological triangulation using the log data for the recorded lectures can provide this.
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In this paper we analyse the way students tag recorded lectures. We compare their tagging strategy and the tags that they create with tagging done by an expert. We look at the quality of the tags students add, and we introduce a method of measuring how similar the tags are, using vector space modelling and cosine similarity. We show that the quality of tagging by students is high enough to be useful. We also show that there is no generic vocabulary gap between the expert and the students. Our study shows no statistically significant correlation between the tag similarity and the indicated interest in the course, the perceived importance of the course, the number of lectures attended, the indicated difficulty of the course, the number of recorded lectures viewed, the indicated ease of finding the needed parts of a recorded lecture, or the number of tags used by the student.
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A lot of research into the use of recorded lectures has been done by using surveys or interviews. We will show that triangulation of multiple data sources is needed. We will discuss how students use recorded lectures according to their self-report and what actual usage of the recorded lectures can be derived from the data on the system. We will present the data collections and cover areas where the data can be triangulated to increase the credibility of the results or to question the students' responses. The triangulation shows that we lack data for a number of areas. We will need high-quality surveys and interviews combined with the log data to get a complete picture. We need to be able to link data sets together based on the identification of the individual students, which might raise privacy issues.