Inclusivity in learning and teaching is critical to allow students from a variety of backgrounds, with different strengths and support needs, to succeed in their studies.  One way to approach this is to utilise a range of learning and teaching activities that marry traditional approaches with other activities such as interactive sessions and digital resources such as lecture capture.  

Many institutions now record lectures (and other sessions), making these captures available to the students via the virtual learning environment. It is always strongly advocated that this helps promotes inclusive learning, by supporting students who struggle with the traditional didactic lecture.  However, the introduction of lecture capture has not been without controversy, not least around student attendance, about the types of sessions that should be captured and also issues with how students engage with the captures for maximum benefit. Indeed, it could be argued that providing the captures adds an additional challenge around inclusivity, as some students instinctively know how to use these to maximum benefit, while others use the captures in a way that actually inhibits their learning and teaching development. 

Despite the importance of students using captures effectively, ensuring they are able to understand and develop the best approach to how they learn with them, high profile formal support for students in an institutional context is often not provided. This is certainly the case at the University of Sheffield, where our institutional approach to lecture capture was rolled out in 2017/18. This approach meant that in the first year we had over 33,000 individual recordings, accessed by 16,702 individual users, who had over 1 million views of the captures. While some support for students was provided, this was not necessarily visible to the students, or departments.  

Reflecting on what we have in place has led to the institution to consider how support for students can be provided on an institutional basis, with training for students on how to use captures appropriately, and also support for departments in this area. The session aims to show staff and departments the plans the university is putting in place for the 2019/20 academic year to provide an institutional level approach to supporting students in using lecture capture. The plans currently in place will be presented, but importantly there will also be an opportunity to shape the direction of the plans, before roll out in the 2019/20 academic year. Attendees will be able to see how Sheffield is using a student-generated guide in joined up way across academic departments and professional services to support students.