Listen Again is a service at the University of Essex that records the audio and video of many of your teaching sessions. The service allows you to ‘listen again’ to lectures to improve your understanding and allow you to revise at a time and place that is convenient to you. The Listen Again service is only available in teaching rooms or lecture theatres where the recording equipment is installed. Information will be displayed in these rooms to signal that the service is in operation.

No. This service is free of charge to all students of the University of Essex.

If your lecture takes place in a room that has Listen Again installed – which will be denoted by a sign – then it may have been recorded. We don’t record some events such as tutorials. Lecturers may choose not to be recorded and if the lecture covers things such as patient confidentiality.

You will be able to replay lectures using the Listen Again service on most mobile phones, PCs, Macs, MP3 players, iPads and other tablet PCs.

You can access the Listen Again service via the MyEssex student portal at http://www.essex.ac.uk/students/ as well as Moodle.

You can subscribe to all your lectures. This means that they will be automatically downloaded to your device.

No – these recordings are for your personal use only. If you did this two things are likely to happen, your lecturer will stop recording their lectures and you will be subject to disciplinary procedures.

If your lecture has been recorded then it will be available through Listen Again approximately 24 hours of your lecture taking place.

First, check you were in a teaching room where the Listen Again service was available, if you weren’t there is no recording. You need to wait for two days until the lecture has passed before it’s available on the Listen Again service. Listen Again may not be available a number of reasons, such as it contains copyright material, if it contains personal information about individuals that cannot be recorded, or if your school, the module or your lecturer has opted out of the service. Ask your lecturer if your School or module has been restricted from recording.

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 capsure 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. 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.

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.

A decision to opt out of, or restrict access to, Listen Again recordings will never be done to penalise students who were unable to attend a teaching event, or to incentivise attendance. However, there are some justifiable instances when Departments and staff can choose to opt out of recording a teaching event, or to retrospectively restrict access to recordings once they have been made. Often there is a very good reason behind this so please speak to your lecturer or department to discover why they have restricted access to recordings.

Sometimes a recording is not made because the teaching PC is switched off or there has been a technical fault. Unfortunately we are unable to restore a recording in these cases, but we may be able to reuse a recording from a previous academic year. Please ask your lecturer if last year's recording would be suitable, and direct them to the IT Help Desk.

You should talk to your lecturer and discuss this. Your lecturer will remove either the whole recording or parts where you speak.

Please see the rooms and events page for more information.

No. Listen Again is a service provided to support student learning and attendance policy remains the same. Evidence shows that students who attend lectures are far more likely to succeed in their studies than those who do not.