Benefits of Using Course Capture

Review the Benefits and Answers to Common Questions About Course Capture

Course Capture recordings offer students more flexibility in accessing their lecture-based learning and can accommodate different learning needs. These can include:
- Captioning to improve comprehension (currently over 25% of students watch Course Capture recordings with the captions turned on).
- A search feature of the transcript to clarify points they misheard or need to further review.
- In larger classrooms, it offers a better closeup view of the chalkboard or demonstrations.
- The ability to watch a recording at a pace that’s most comfortable for that individual student.

Instructors can quickly build a library of content that they can reuse. Recordings can be cut into smaller segments to cover specific topics.
- This is particularly useful when an instructor is unable to teach a class on any given day and can share a recording of that topic with their students.
- Having a library of course videos and offering them in advance can save time so that live classes can be spent on greater engagement and active learning approaches for students
Course Capture recordings offer analytics in an instructor’s bCourses Media Gallery. One benefit of viewing these analytics is that instructors can see if students are re-watching a particular lecture or section of a video frequently. This can be an indication that students are finding that specific topic confusing. In seeing what content gets watched or re-watched frequently, instructors can then provide more guidance during live class time to support or argument understanding of challenging topics for students.
Students who are sick are more likely to stay home if they are able to view the recording after the class.

Instructors have full control of who to share the recordings with and when. While we recommend that instructors share the recordings with all their students, the instructor can also decide to share the recordings with an individual, a group, or no students at all.
The ability for students to download video recordings is disabled by default. However, instructors can enable the download feature individually.

Instructors will maintain their IP for all of their course content. UC Regents do claim copyright of the recordings themselves, and only to these particular recordings, to ensure that recordings are not shared publicly without appropriate accessibility features and captioning of the audio.

Course Capture is not meant to replace in-person lectures. There are many benefits of in-person lectures that recordings will not be able to replicate. Some of these benefits include Q&A, student polling/quizzing, think-pair-share exercises, and expansion upon known tricky topics. Our Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) has resources on encouraging attendance and active learning strategies that are particularly beneficial for an in-person experience.
One common method to keep classroom attendance high is implementing frequent low-stakes assessments to encourage attendance such as a quiz that students receive credit for upon completion. This method will also provide a real-time understanding of student knowledge and gaps that the instructor can then use to determine how well students are understanding and engaging with course content
Instructors can also take attendance by using one of the campus’s existing supported tools for attendance.

Course Capture is currently available in 98% of General Assignment (GA) classrooms and will soon be available in every GA space. List of Course Capture-enabled rooms can be found on the RTL Classroom Database.

Please review the Instructor Getting Started page for details and email coursecapture@berkeley.edu if you have any questions.