An analysis of the use of virtual delivery of undergraduate lectures

Educators and technologists have been wrestling with the most appropriate w ay in which to use information technology in teaching and in learning, for some years. We have seen online course notes, both linear, hypertext and hy permedia format; lecturer/student communication via electronic bulletin boa rds or via e-mail, multimedia courseware with student-directed learning and many others. All of these approaches have had limited impact on mainstream teaching in our universities and colleges and we believe one of the reason s for this is that these attempts all represent a significant shift in the normal student-lecturer relationship and an enormous amount of effort on th e part of the lecturer. In our work we have addressed this by using technol ogy to replicate the traditional mode of delivery of lectures to a class. T he presentation of lecture material was digitally recorded, both audio and synchronised visuals, and made available for students to take in their own time. In addition we provided 3 orthogonal means to access this material. T he present paper describes our analysis of the use of these 'virtual lectur es' by a class of over 100 students. Our analysis includes log files of all accesses to the online material, pre-course and post-course questionnaires and anonymous questionnaire feedback, some of this is compared to exam per formance. Results indicate that mode of delivery, student usage and a stude nt's technical bias have no impact on overall exam performance. (C) 1999 El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.