Listen Again is the lecture capture system used by the University of Essex. It records teaching events, and allows students to review the recordings at a later date. Various studies have shown that lecture recordings can aid students in their revision; and the recordings are invaluable to those with a student support need or English as a second language.

Listen Again records events according to the following criteria:

• All centrally timetabled teaching rooms at the Colchester and Southend campuses;
• Eligible event types (eg. Lectures, but not Exams);
• Any audio in the room (via a microphone), the lectern AV PC screen; and in some rooms, the visualiser and laptop input.
  • Note: screen recording will record all activity on the lectern PC, and ignores projector 'No Show'.

Listen Again will be installed in rooms which meet the following criteria:

• Are centrally timetabled (CTO) or departmentally owned (DR);
• Account for at least 5,000 student taught hours, excluding Tutorials and other event classifications not recorded by Listen Again;
• Contain a single, fixed presentation computer (AV lectern), which is less than 5 years old and meets Panopto's requirements.

Rooms will be evaluated using data held by CTO, and prioritised according to the number of student taught hours. Rooms which fail to meet these criteria will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Please deliver your teaching events using the Zoom invite links that have been automatically added to your Outlook calendar. This way, you don’t need to do anything afterwards – your event is recorded automatically and then copied to Listen Again and presented instead of your usual face-to-face recording. Listen Again will continue to honour your recording preference (opt-out).

We do not recommend that you deliver your teaching events in any other way due to the large amount of time it takes to manually upload and match the recordings.

Dual-mode teaching events will produce two recordings, one of the physical teaching room and one from Zoom. Both will be imported into Panopto but the Zoom recording will take priority.

You can swap to your preferred recording by following the instructions provided at http://www1.essex.ac.uk/it/docs/help/listen-again-swap-a-recording.pdf

Recording of lectures is very popular with students – many of whom use their mobile phones and MP3 players to make ad hoc recordings to support their learning during revision. Providing a higher quality digital service at a University-wide level is now expected by our students and will keep us in line with what is being offered by other 1994 and Russell group universities. The service will support students’ learning by providing additional help for students whose first language isn’t English, by providing the opportunity to hear parts of the lecture that may have been missed the first time or not fully understood and to provide the full lecture in the event that a student was unable to attend.

The recordings will be made available only to the audience you have chosen and, and other academic staff who also teach the module. Any other use of the recording, such as sharing the recordings with a partner institution or third-parties, will require you to give further consent. Staff can download their own recordings to support their annual review.

We keep recordings of teaching events for a total of two academic years (Current Academic Year +1). This is to provide students an alternative resource should there ever be a significant disruption to teaching, such as the Icelandic volcano eruption in 2010. After two academic years the recordings are permanently destroyed, with no option to recover them. This is done on an automatic basis without informing the lecturer(s) associated with each recording.

Other recordings, either scheduled on an ad-hoc basis or uploaded to Panopto directly, are kept for a total of two academic years (CAY+1) from the date of upload. After 18 months we will contact the owner(s) of each recording with information on how to download the recording to their own device. After two academic years the recordings are permanently destroyed with no option to recover them.

We understand that some recordings may continue be useful after two academic years. We are still working out the details, but there will be ways for staff to keep recordings for up to 5 academic years if needed.

There is no option to keep recordings longer than five academic years.

If you leave the University then we will keep your recordings in accordance with the above retention periods. Where a recording is re-used, e.g. to cover disruption to teaching, then we will provide access based on your last-known opt-out (recording preference).

Your employment contract already contains a clause that transfers the ownership of any teaching materials to the University. The actual delivery of the lecture, the performance rights, remain with you. By default we will record you and share this with the appropriate module groups.

The Equality Act (2010) requires us to ensure that we provide students having Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) with reasonable adjustment to enable them the same chance of success as other students. The University considers that in many cases Listen Again can provide this, however equally respects your rights and allows you to opt-out of recording if you feel this is not the best way to achieve equality. However, if you do wish to opt-out of recording, please ensure that suitable alternative measures are in place and agreed with your Deputy Dean of Education.

We understand that staff may wish to remove recordings from Listen Again. We ask that requests are made in writing to listenag@essex.ac.uk, stating which recordings will be removed. We will aim to remove any requested recordings within two business days.

A small number of staff prefer to let students use their own personal recording devices (eg. mobile phone), rather than relying on Listen Again. However, this is subject to point 7.3 of the University’s Academic Regulations [https://www.essex.ac.uk/governance/regulations], requiring the student to gain consent from all involved.

This attracts some risk, as he University has no way of tracking how personal recordings are subsequently used or the context in which they are presented. Additionally, the legal ownership of the recording becomes more complex as the student (or whoever made the recording) also owns some of the rights to it.

Listen Again tracks who views and downloads each recording. Additionally, students must agree to terms and conditions prior to accessing any recordings on Listen Again (see below for details). It is also relatively trivial for the University to destroy a recording when required.

Students are asked to agree to terms and conditions before they are allowed to access any recordings on Listen Again. This agreement states that redistributing recordings will be considered an academic offence, and any student caught doing so will be subject to disciplinary procedures.

Staff are automatically opted-in to Listen Again at the default level of recording (recordings available to students on relevant modules). You can change who has access to youyr recordings by changing your preferences.

Recordings will be exclusively available to the featured members of staff for approximately 24 hours after the event is recorded. After this, staff can still edit, but the recording will be released to all eligible students. You can use Listen Again to edit the recording and remove parts or all that you do not wish to be presented to students.

In short. No.

Relatively few studies on the effect of lecture capture on student attendance have been undertaken. Those that have indicate that attendance is not affected by the presence of such a system (Bradley et al 2009). More evidence exists from studies of those podcasting (generally audio-only) their teaching sessions and it does not seem to have a negative impact on lecture attendance. Some studies report a small reduction in attendance at lectures when podcasts are available (Traphagan et al 2009, Harpp et al 2004) with Harpp et al suggesting a reduction of less than 10%. The significant finding, however, is that even where there is a drop in attendance this does not translate into lower student performance because the podcasts seem to compensate. Other studies (White 2009, Bongey et al 2006, Grabe and Christopherson 2008, Harley et al 2003 and Holbrook & Dupont 2003) have found no significant association between attendance and download frequency in part because 'students overwhelmingly preferred the actual lectures to the recorded podcasts' (Bongey et al 2006).
- https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=echo360-staff-student-experiences.pdf&site=81

In general, access to recorded lectures has little to no effect on student attendance at live lectures (Von Konsky et al. 2009; Holbrook & Dupont, 2009; Pursel & Fang, 2012). However, some studies have found that recorded lectures do seem to have a slight negative effect on lecture attendance (Gorissen et al. 2012), which may be explained by natural declines in student attendance over time, the maturity of students, and inability to attend live lectures due to disability.
- http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/50929/1/Karnad_Student_use_recorded_2013_author.pdf

More recent studies have shown that there is negligible impact on attendance (Morris, 2015; McGowan, 2015). In 2017, Senate agreed with a Task and Finish Group's findings that lecture capture did not affect student attentance.

Yes, there are two ways of doing this. You can either pause the recording whilst it is taking place, or you can edit the recording once it has finished.

You can pause the recording by clicking on the Panopto icon in the system tray, and selecting Pause. The recording will continue to take place, but the paused sections will be edited out (see below). You can recover these paused sections by editng the recording.

Alternatively, recordings will be exclusively available to the featured members of staff for approximately 4 hours after the event is recorded. After this, staff can still edit, but the recording will be released to all eligible students. You can use Listen Again to edit the recording and remove parts or all that you do not wish to be presented to students.

You can record and upload your lecture to the Listen Again service using a piece of software called Panopto. This will enable you to record a lecture on your own computer and upload it to Listen Again when you have an internet connection. Students can then access the Lecture online and watch it back any time they want. If you are interested in doing this, please contact the Listen Again team (email: listenagain).

Listen Again uses information from the teaching timetables held by the Central Timetabling Office. If you wish to correct this information, you can either do so via the online teaching timetables, or by contacting CTO (email: cto).

The Listen Again service is made available via the MyEssex student portal as well as ORB, and Moodle.

There are several reasons for this. It could be that the lectern PC wasn't used, so there was no audiovisual component for the session. Alternatively, only certain rooms capture laptop, visualiser, and DVD output; the majority of rooms will not capture these.

We stop the recording at 50 minutes because this is the end of the lecture, as defined by the University's Timetabling Policy. After the lecture there are often conversations that are not part of the lecture and often it would be wrong for this to be recorded.

Listen Again records the entire timetabled slot, this includes any breaks in teaching events longer than one hour.

For smaller rooms, Listen Again relies on microphones placed near the lectern PC or in the ceiling to capture the audio. In larger rooms, we provide lapel microphones for lecturing staff to use. If the recording volume is low, it could be caused by the lecturer being far from the microphone.

Please talk with the student and see if they can be persuaded that their contribution is valued and adds to the pedagogic worth of the lecture. If they are still insistent that they should not be recorded then the lecturer[s] identified by the timetables can selectively edit out the student contribution. If this is not possible then the whole lecture can be removed, your Head of Department should request this.