Webcasting profs open classroom to the world

What do a retiree in Pasadena, a soldier in Iraq and a college student in Japan have in common? None of them go to UCLA, but through webcasts, they're all sitting in on university lectures.

 

"Anyone on Earth can watch my lectures online, and every quarter, I get five to 10 e-mails from retired engineers in Pasadena, or pre-med students in Japan — from all over the world — saying, 'I've been watching your course, and I think it's fantastic,'" said Jay Phelan, a UCLA biologist.

 

Phelan is one of about 50 professors and lecturers at UCLA who post their classes online through the open-access iTunes U, or through UCLA's proprietary BruinCast, which allows professors to limit who has access to the recordings. Although the main goal of webcasting lectures is to give enrolled students an edge in studying, professors who post their classes without password protection are finding their audiences are now nearly limitless in number.

 

 

"I've gotten about 1,000 e-mails over the past two years … from retirees, from students at community colleges or people who are very poor but dream of being at UCLA," Phelan said. "I've even had UCLA freshmen in my class tell me they watched all my lectures while they were in high school."

 

UC Berkeley Physics Professor Richard Muller, who posts his classes online using iTunes U, is sometimes recognized by fans of his podcasts at university football games. "They think they're contacting a TV personality," Muller joked. Muller, Phelan and Tim Groeling, an assistant professor of communications studies, spoke at a May 21 presentation to encourage their colleagues to join them in the podcasting revolution.

 

"There's an incredible thirst for this knowledge," said Muller, who has received hundreds of letters from 50 states and 80 countries, including a high school student in Estonia who decided to get a physics degree after hearing the lectures and a carpenter who decided to go back to college after tuning in to Muller's classes. A soldier in Iraq wrote him, saying, "We often ride patrols between Baghdad and Ramadi, and I would listen to your lectures in one ear, and the HumVee com system in the other."

 

After a lecture in which Muller jokingly mentioned Timbuktu, a response arrived from a listener living in sub-Saharan Africa: "Well, Timbuktu is in Mali — and that's where I'm writing you from!"

 

Posting classes online is a way to show people in California what the UC campuses do, Muller said. "The e-mails I get are typically, 'Thank you so much for doing this. I could never go to the university,' or 'I couldn't get in,' or 'I had to go to work,' or 'We don't have a university like that,' or whatever. 'And here you are letting me in to the education that students are getting at the University of California ... I am so grateful.' By the way, I love to show this to my deans."

 

The feedback is really satisfying, Phelan said. "It reminds me that we're making people's lives better by teaching them."

 

 

Phelan has also been amazed by the way his students have begun using his webcasts.

 

"They started having 'watching parties' in the dorm," he said. "They sit before an exam, and get seven or eight or nine of them in the room, and watch all the lectures leading up to the exam." He hears stories of the students laughing and telling jokes while filling in their notes from the original lecture, getting a chance to simultaneously socialize and study with precision.

 

They also worry less about missing a detail in class, Phelan said. His office hours are more valuable now that they no longer involve students asking him to repeat a small phrase or to re-show them a PowerPoint slide, since students can review any part of the class themselves, he said.

 

"They told me, 'Do you know how great it is to have a pause button for you?'" said Phelan, who conceded that he tends to talk "really fast."

 

He initially worried that providing his entire lecture online would kill his attendance and make students lazier about taking notes, but instead, students now sit through his lectures multiple times.

 

"It's not a way for them to be slightly lazier. It's helping them be more industrious," he said. And although his attendance has dipped slightly — about 3-5 percent by his calculations — he notes that students will be listening to the lecture either way, "and most of them prefer the 'high-definition' real me."

 

For Groeling, who keeps his lectures password-protected so only his students can access the recordings, using BruinCast helps increase student participation by freeing them from frantic note-taking.

 

"Aspiring stenographers tend to miss any opportunity for interaction," he said.

 

 

Giving students that freedom has made a difference in their performance, Groeling said. On tests that measure both material from lectures and material that was only in their reading, there's a stark difference, he said.

 

"If it was in my lecture, they know it cold," he said. "If it's in the reading, they're testing the same as they were before [I started using BruinCast]." And overall, "it's made a large difference in the quality of my students' learning."

 

Both he and Phelan noticed that students' questions during office hours tend to be deeper and more relevant. They've also found that English-as-a-second-language students thrive with webcasting.

 

"They're doing much, much better on exams," Groeling said. "We almost have to handicap them."

 

When asked for feedback on webcasting lectures, Phelan's students gave it universal approval.

 

"One hundred percent have viewed the BruinCast, and that alone says it's something of value to them," Phelan said. "And they say so on their evaluations."

 

As the popularity of webcasting has grown, entire classrooms have been outfitted with camera and sound systems – but not every classroom.

 

"We fight to get those rooms," Phelan said.

 

"It used to be," Groeling mused, "a fight to get the overhead projector."

 

Find out more

• To learn about iTunes U or BruinCast: contact Rose Rocchio, the director of academic applications in the Office of Information Technology, at rrocchio@ucla.edu.
• View the presentations given by Groeling, Phelan and Muller by downloading them through iTunes.