2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many colleges and universities and their engineering programs, including ours, adopted lecture recordings as a temporary means to provide remote and hybrid instruction. With the return of in-person classes, many students have asked our faculty to continue making these recordings as a supplemental educational resource. At the same time, many disability advocates have noted that these recordings greatly increase accessibility and reduce barriers for disabled students. However, given the technical challenges involved in making high-quality lecture recordings, as well as concerns about student attendance and engagement, our faculty have had mixed opinions about adopting these recordings as a general practice. To reach a consensus, our department, with the guidance of our departmental Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Committee, used anonymous surveys and discussions to examine the opinions and attitudes of our students, faculty and advising staff surrounding the use of classroom recordings. We also examined recorded lecture viewership data for individual students across four core courses and compared this data to their course academic performance and level of engagement to determine if a relationship existed. We then examined our findings in the broader context of the pre-pandemic educational literature on classroom recordings. This approach enabled us to quickly reach a consensus that for the type of classes we typically offer, lecture recordings provide students with a highly valuable supplemental resource that has overall positive educational benefits. This consensus enabled us to shift our effort toward the more practical matter of how to support our faculty in overcoming logistical and technological barriers to creating recordings, while also honoring differences in teaching pedagogy. This paper outlines our collaborative process, the conclusions reached by our department, and the concrete steps we have taken to increase lecture recording throughout the curriculum. We also highlight places where additional studies and methods are needed to understand and support the nationwide use of lecture recordings in engineering education.