Does lecture capturing improve learning?: A data driven exploratory study on the effectiveness of lecture capture on learning in a foundation IT course

The primary objective of a foundation IT course is to equip students with necessary IT skills to facilitate problem solving in daily life, academic studies and the future workplace. As an IT educator, we always come across a high degree of digital divide among students, as exemplified by the post-course student evaluation feedback: a group of students reflected the foundation IT course as “too easy” but another group expressed as “too difficult”. Educational technology solutions, e.g., lecture capturing, have been adopted to archive the classroom delivery for subsequent review by students so that users can access the relevant contents on demand anytime and anywhere with a mobile device connected to the Internet. Educators advocate that the use of lecture capturing generally improves students' academic performance. This paper extends the discussion with another angle: how does lecture capturing improve learning? Specifically, our research questions are: 1) Do students' frequency of access and duration of watching the captured lecture directly influence the academic results? and 2) Is lecture capturing effective for all students, or only to some student groups with different academic performance? A data driven approach was used to analyze the relationship between students' academic performance, the frequency and duration of accessing the captured lecture contents. Our results suggest that lecture capturing is more effective among the mid-range achievers, and tend to have minimal effects on the two ends of the achiever scale (i.e., two extremes: the high achievers and the low achievers).