Webcasting profs open classroom to the world / UCLA Today
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Jun 01, 2009 By Alison Hewitt
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Webcasting profs open classroom to the world
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What do a retiree in Pasadena, a soldier in Iraq and a college student in Japan have in common? None of them go
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to UCLA, but through webcasts, they're all sitting in on university lectures.
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"Anyone on Earth can watch my lectures online, and
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every quarter, I get five to 10 e-mails from retired
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engineers in Pasadena, or pre-med students in Japan —
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from all over the world — saying, 'I've been watching your
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course, and I think it's fantastic,'" said Jay Phelan, a
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UCLA biologist.
After hours
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UCLA biologist Jay Phelan's students can listen to
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Board
Phelan is one of about 50 professors and lecturers at
his lectures on their iPods or other devices. Photo by
UCLA who post their classes online through the open-
Reed Hutchinson.
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access iTunes U, or through UCLA's proprietary
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Webcasting profs open classroom to the world / UCLA Today
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
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protection are finding their audiences are now nearly limitless in number.
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Lectures heard 'round the world
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"I've gotten about 1,000 e-mails over the past two years … from retirees, from students at community colleges or
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people who are very poor but dream of being at UCLA," Phelan said. "I've even had UCLA freshmen in my class tell
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me they watched all my lectures while they were in high school."
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UC Berkeley Physics Professor Richard Muller, who posts his
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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
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UCLA on iTunes U
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
UC Berkeley Physics Professor Richard
physics degree after hearing the lectures and a carpenter who
Muller has fans in Estonia, Timbuktu and
decided to go back to college after tuning in to Muller's classes. A
Iraq.
soldier in Iraq wrote him, saying, "We often ride patrols between
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Webcasting profs open classroom to the world / UCLA Today
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 subSaharan 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."
"Watching parties" and other new ways to study
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
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Webcasting profs open classroom to the world / UCLA Today
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."
Tim Groeling, an assistant professor of
For Groeling, who keeps his lectures password-protected so only
communications studies, has noticed his
his students can access the recordings, using BruinCast helps
students improving now that they can review
increase student participation by freeing them from frantic note-
his lectures online.
taking.
"Aspiring stenographers tend to miss any opportunity for interaction," he said.
A plus for student learning
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Webcasting profs open classroom to the world / UCLA Today
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.
Phelan and Groeling chat after giving
presentations to convince other professors to
"We fight to get those rooms," Phelan said.
"It used to be," Groeling mused, "a fight to get the overhead projector."
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join the webcasting revolutions.
Webcasting profs open classroom to the world / UCLA Today
Find out more
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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.
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View the presentations given by Groeling, Phelan and Muller by downloading them through iTunes.
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