The DMU Replay service went live ahead of the 2016/17 academic year at DMU. Comprising of software, policy, and guidance and support for both students and staff members; the service is the only recognised and centrally supported multimedia platform for use in the curriculum at DMU. Having this service available and supported provides the opportunity to enable different approaches to not only teaching but also assessment.

Here’s my top five:

1. Bite-sized chunks are easier to swallow
The ‘go to’ use for DMU Replay is to record live sessions and post the entire video. However, students rarely watch more than 8 minutes of a session recording at a time! Instead of recording a 50 minute live session; try creating short, bite-sized snippets outside of the session. This not only satisfies the DMU Replay policy but it frees up teaching time to explore different approaches such as a more Active Learning based approach and engages with students in short bursts!

2. Making feedback more meaningful
Online feedback enables students to engage with feedback immediately but text comments on a document can still be dry and open to interpretation. Using DMU Replay, colleagues can record a screencast with audio that shows students their coursework with the staff member narrating feedback. This approach enriches and humanises the feedback as students hear the tone and inflection in the narrative while visually they see their own work on screen while listening to the feedback.

3. It’s not just for staff members
Every DMU student has the ability to log in to DMU Replay and (assuming a setting or two has been made) download the software and create their own content. From assessed videos (coursework) to weekly reflective vlogs and video presentations, students can access the full range of tools.

4. It’s not just about Panopto
Yes, the product that DMU Replay uses is Panopto; but that doesn’t mean staff and students are restricted to recording using only this software. Any video and/or audio file can be uploaded into DMU Replay. Panopto do provide free mobile app’s but recording on a ‘phone’s video recorder, to capture that moment for reflection, can be just as effective and uses technology that students will likely be au fait with already.

The system can also link to other platforms – say, during your 5 minute bite-sized recording you want to show your students a 30 second YouTube clip; this is easily inserted into your video and will play seamlessly when your students watch your video.

5. Helping us to enhance the curriculum
As all recordings eventually end up in DMU Replay, the service becomes quite a powerful tool for capturing information about who is viewing our content and how. This can help us as educators to understand and shape our pedagogy and approaches by identifying specific video clips that might be watched over and over again. Using this technique as a starting point we can reflect on why this might be and enhance our approaches.

6. And a cheeky but very important sixth
DMU Replay is the only DMU service that can produce 99% accurate captions.

In module folders, where a student has a captioning requirement, this will have been turned on behind the scenes to ensure students are not excluded. If we keep our videos in other places, the high accuracy captions will never be added and those students will miss out.