Case Stories Andrew Cree Teesside University Business School

Teaching International Students – Case Story August 2010

Using screen-capture movies to help international students transition to UK higher education

What were the issues:

In 2009 Teesside University Business School was very successful in recruiting international students especially from China. Within the first few weeks it became apparent throughout the Business School that many of the Chinese students had difficulty following the spoken word in lectures and were unclear about the demands of University education in the UK. I experienced this first hand on my final year undergraduate course: 'Contemporary Issues in Human Resource Management (HRM)'. More than half of the class were international students including 8 Chinese students who were direct entrants to the third year.

What you did to address this:

The issues were raised at the Business School Teaching and Learning Committee. As a member of the Committee with expertise in the creative use of software I volunteered to record my lectures. As an experienced user of Camtasia Studio 6 I decided to use the PowerPoint add-in feature. Using this feature PowerPoint slides can be narrated and recorded as a movie and when the movie is rendered into Flash format any words written in PowerPoint notes can be inserted as captions. These captions can then be carefully aligned with the sound through simple use of the editing feature. Having done this I then rendered the movie into Flash (SWF) format and placed it on my 'Contemporary Issues in HRM' Blackboard site (with a link on Blackboard to the Business School server).

What others can do:

You can use Camtasia Studio to create captioned movies of your lectures. The software isn’t hard to use - it really just requires practice. The benefits of creating such movies are that international (in fact all) students can play the movies 24/7; pause and replay as often as they like; follow the audio/the visual slide/ and read the captions all at the same time. You will see from the link below that captioning can go beyond just writing-up word for word the audio: the beauty of captions is that the key points/themes can be clearly flagged-up: http://tbs-staffweb.tees.ac.uk/U0003084/persuasioncaptions/persuasioncaptions.html

Second, also of benefit to both international and home students you could create a set of study skill & information literacy movies to help all students study the module (and help international students transition to UK University level education).

1 Teaching International Students – Case Story August 2010

For example:

Searching for articles electronically: http://tbs-staffweb.tees.ac.uk/U0003084/search/search.html

Harvard referencing: http://tbs-staffweb.tees.ac.uk/U0003084/harvard09/harvard09.html

Guide to the mark sheet: http://tbs-staffweb.tees.ac.uk/U0003084/marksheet/marksheet.html

Why write a formative assignment: http://tbs-staffweb.tees.ac.uk/U0003084/formative/formative.html

If you use Blackboard it is very easy to place the links to these movies under the assessment button.

Were the movies helpful to my international students? At the end of the year only one international student failed the exam. All students (home and international) benefitted from captioned movies of the lectures and the study skill & information literacy movies.

Andrew Cree [email protected] Business School Teesside University