The University of Western Australia (UWA) first embarked on streaming lectures in October 1998, developing a system to capture and process audio taped lecture recordings. The system evolved into a fully automated recording system (Lectopia) that directly records the audio and/or video of lectures - a system that has now been in action at UWA since 2000 and has recorded tens of thousands of lectures.

Lectopia Usage at UWA

In 2006 over 10,000 UWA students used Lectopia. Lectures were recorded from hundreds of units in Humanities, Social Sciences, Law, Economics, Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Business. From the beginning of 2005, the standard Lectopia service has been granted central funding from UWA's Facilities budget which has resulted in a significant increase of recording requests, and more and more students are being exposed to and utilising Lectopia recordings in their learning activities.

Please refer to Usage Statistics for more information regarding Lectopia's use at UWA.

Student and Staff Feedback

Student surveys have shown that students using Lectopia fall into the following categories:

• students revising, including exam preparation
• students catching up on the occasional missed lecture
• part-time students or students with difficulty attending face-to-face lecture (including students with disabilities)
• students seeking clarification of lecture material (including students with English as a second language)
• students studying in regional locations
• students choosing to access Lectopia rather than attend face-to-face lecture

The uptake in the use of Lectopia by teaching staff at UWA has been significant. Apart from the benefits to students, teaching staff have reported many other benefits from using Lectopia, including:

• students are less likely to ask repetitive questions about material covered in lectures
• informal feedback can be gathered from students using the Lecture Rating feature
• accessing one's own lectures provides the opportunity for self-review
• listening to previous year's lectures can be useful when preparing lectures