Lightboards are taking root in higher education. This session examines their usefulness as a recruiting tool for faculty to create high quality media content, and presents data supporting their effectiveness in increasing student learning outcomes.
How do instructional designers and faculty support units ensure that a new technology like a lightboard is carefully adopted and doesn’t collect dust? How can faculty be sure that new delivery methods such as the lightboard are actually increasing student success? In this session, Instructional Designer Sean Holland and Assistant Professor of Biology Devin Drown of the University of Alaska Fairbanks will describe their successful efforts to solve these problems.
In 2016, the eLearning department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks installed a lightboard. As a result of outreach efforts and many working relationships, the lightboard has been used in over 500 published videos used in courses. During the initial implementation of the lightboard it became apparent that the lightboard itself was bringing faculty into the studio space who would otherwise have not chosen to create media content or who had never before produced content in the production studio. We realized that the lightboard itself held a special cachet in the eyes of instructors. It was both familiar and innovative. It’s sleekness belied its simplicity, yet it contained possibilities for creation of very effective course content well beyond the initial “wow” factor, and faculty interested was sustained far beyond the initial spark of excitement.
Over the course of working with dozens of faculty on many hundreds of videos, we have come to understand the reasons that the lightboard holds sway over the interests of otherwise very busy professors. While the lightboard is a new medium, the concepts underlying it are fairly rooted in traditional lecture pedagogy. Professors still get to deliver a lecture while writing on a board. This familiarity generates immediate interest and also makes the learning curve fairly short.
Even though a lightboard is rooted in the familiar, it has some important affordances that augment the shortcomings of that ancient delivery method. The limited space on the glass forces topics to be concisely delivered, or broken up. Instructional designers highly encourage the “one-board, one-video” rule and assist faculty in cutting an overly long lecture into several lecturettes. The compression of the written visual content and the instructor’s visual presence into one single 2D plane assists students in comprehending the content. Watching concepts written out in natural handwriting is assistive to some students, and the constant presence of the instructor’s mouth movements, facial expressions and hand gestures are akin to an accessibility accommodation for students who require more than audio alone to grasp intent and meaning.
As a result of one of the working relationships that developed around content creation with the lightboard, Assistant Professor of Biology Devin Drown was able to determine that the inclusion of these videos in his face to face evolution course led to significant improvements on learning outcomes. Students who engaged meaningfully with the lightboard videos showed increased scores on exam assessments than students who did not watch the videos. Dr. Drown used per-user analytics in Kaltura MediaSpace to gather this watch data.
After UAF eLearning produced the first video for his evolution course, Dr. Drown realized “Wow, this is very easy. eLearning took care of all of the video production details that I don’t want to learn.” It was valuable to him to have instructional designers and other media experts take care of the editing and production. In addition, Dr. Drown found value in creating lightboard videos in the studio due to rich nature of the assistance he was provided, such as closed captioning, training and coaching. As he puts it, “instructional designers guided me toward better on-screen practices in a way where I didn’t know it was happening. They took an open and non-judgemental approach, and gave appropriate suggestions, and I always felt I had the chance to do multiple takes or come back on a different day. Their production environment fostered my eagerness to return.”
Dr. Drown used the lightboard videos that he created for the math/quantitative learning section in his upper division evolution course. He encouraged students to view the videos, but did not make this required. About half the class actively engaged with this new medium. In all cases, topics were covered in the different ways; the lightboard was not the sole means of gaining the information. Some material was also presented in lab, lecture, or exercises and student learning outcomes were measured based on viewership analytics. We found that those students who used the videos performed better on the exams. We were able to control for many factors including initial preparedness for the course.