A cross sectional survey design was employed to evaluate students’ experience of teaching and learning by webcast. A questionnaire developed specially for the purpose was used to collect data.

This paper reports on student participation and satisfaction with the use of webcasting in a third year undergraduate nursing and midwifery research methods module.

The focus of this module was to develop a research proposal. The module had previously been delivered by a combination of six two hour lectures and small group tutorials. In the 2008 academic year, four lectures were available either as live webcasts or, at the same time, as face-to-face lectures at the University’s central site with different members of staff. All 129 third year nursing and midwifery undergraduate students enrolled on the module were invited to attend either a webcast or a face-to-face lecture.

In May 2008 an email was sent to students (then in their second year), asking them for their views concerning changing the method of delivery of four of the lectures. Seventy (54%) responded of whom 60 (86% or 47% of the total) indicated that they would be interested in webcasting. Students did not have to commit to either choice but the webcasts were to be run at the same time as face-to-face lectures so that students could not attend both (but they could ‘switch’ between the two methods). Three ‘test’ webcasts open to all students were delivered (two in June and one in September 2008) to familiarise students with the method before the module started.

Table 1 shows features that may affect the success of webcasting, noting those used in this application. Fig. (1) shows how it appeared to the participant.

The four webcasts were developed specifically for each two hour session and delivered by two experienced members of the teaching team, and had similar learning objectives as the face-to-face lectures. Three of the webcasts presented material reviewing subjects that students had studied in their second year (qualitative research, quantitative research and critical research methods), and one focused on new material (systematic reviews and meta analysis, and appraisal of clinical guidelines). The lecturers (GRW and JM) were advised by RJ and IM on colour and font size best suited for webcasts and how to encourage student interaction in the webcasts. Each two hour webcast contained opportunities for group discussion and interaction between students in ‘breakout chat rooms’ (Table 2). In addition to the webcast, small, local, face-to-face tutorials were also offered to support students.

Students who were going to access the webcasts were encouraged to get together in small groups (e.g. at friends’ houses) to enhance the learning experience. The sessions were accessible anywhere with a reasonably fast internet-connection on a computer that played sound. No special software was required for students’ computers to access the webcasts. Each session was recorded and made available to view again within a week via the faculty intranet.

As use for routine undergraduate teaching was a new development within the faculty a decision was made to have an experienced health informatics academic (IM) present (online) during the webcast to support students who were having technical difficulties and also to facilitate use of the chat rooms.

After each of the four webcast sessions the students were sent an email with a web link asking them to complete a web-based questionnaire (available from the authors on request). Each student received a web link containing a unique token, which expired when the student completed the questionnaire. This ensured that the student answered the questionnaire only once. The questionnaire contained 12 questions concerning students’ experience of the webcasts. The first question asked if students were able to view the webcast; nine questions concerned the content of, and students’ satisfaction with, webcasting as a delivery method; and one question asked about time and costs saved as a result of viewing webcasts as opposed to travelling to the university. A final open-ended question asked for any other comments.

Our webcasting system can record the text comments made by participants. These were reviewed to classify the type of comments and proportion of students engaging with the session.

The questionnaire contained a statement guaranteeing students’ confidentiality and anonymity but, because it was an audit of module delivery and therefore a legitimate part of the faculty’s existing quality assurance mechanisms rather than research, formal ethical approval was not required. In order to shield students from any suggestion of harm, responses were returned electronically not to the module and webcast lead (GRW) but to a separate database. This process was overseen by the faculty’s e-learning facilitator (IM) and only then were the anonymised data sent to the module lead for further analysis.

Data were analysed in SPSS version 16 using simple descriptive statistics. In addition, using Spearman’s rho (ρ) to test correlations between variables, we explored whether students’ overall satisfaction with webcasting was influenced by time and cost savings for students by not travelling to the university, by existing knowledge of the subject matter, and by their perception of personal gains accruing from the webcasts. This was done using the results from the first questionnaire responses only, to avoid counting the responses from the same students more than once. The free-text content of the questionnaire responses was also scrutinized using content analysis and broad themes constructed from the brief responses received. Content analysis was inductive, meaning that a model was constructed to describe conceptual data from our students’ responses. There are no formal ‘rules’ for data analysis in content analysis, and judgement was used to classify text into much smaller content categories using coding, categorisation and abstraction, based on repeated reading and understanding of the apparent meaning [12].

Thirty individuals provided comments (Table 4) from the first session on quantitative methods, 29 on the second session on systematic reviews and guidelines, 14 on the third session on qualitative methods, and four on the fourth session on critical research (a total of 77 replies in the free text elements). Students talked about the benefits of webcasts and a preference for the method, highlighting their belief that webcasting was a positive educational experience, offering them something different from traditional lectures, particularly that it improved their ability to interact with the lecturer and the material compared to large group teaching methods. Students also mentioned the cost and time savings made through not travelling to university. Some technical difficulties were experienced by students, although our technical expert (IM) was on hand to deal with these. Being distracted by irrelevant chat in the chat room was an important issue, which included others’ chat and technical queries. Being able to view the recorded webcasts again was also important and they were made available again through the university’s managed learning environment information technology platform. Suggestions on how to improve the presentation and content were also made.

The transcripts of the four webcast sessions were studied to identify the character of the messages. Over the four webcasts students typed approximately 28,624 words, of which there were approximately 8129 messages (including those between students and between students and lecturers). These were grouped into three types to indicate the character of the interactions which took place; these being ‘purposeful’ (text that concerned the research methods under discussion or a task set by the lecturers), ‘technical’ (concerning some aspect of getting the best out of the webcast technology), and ‘extraneous’ (or ‘chatty chat’, concerning personal topics). In total there was approximately 67% purposeful text, 12% technical and 21% extraneous material. Thus approximately 19,178 words were written by students’ solely in engagement with the material under study and there were approximately 5446 purposeful messages, 975 technical messages and 1707 extraneous messages.

We found mean savings of £10.89 and an hour and a quarter travel time through webcasting lectures and it is likely that other Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) would find similar savings on offer to its students; greater cost and time savings would obviously be accrued in more geographically dispersed locations. We have not calculated reductions in ‘carbon footprint’ but with a large proportion of 129 students travelling considerable distances, there is a major saving. As many nursing and midwifery students undertake clinical placements at some distance to their university base, webcasting to their clinical placements may be useful and offer opportunities for further savings. It was not surprising that those who saved the most financially were the most satisfied with the overall experience of webcasting, and that those who saved the most time and money believed that they gained the most from the webcast. Our experience supports the benefits identified by others [9, 11] for post-qualifying nurse education.

Webcasting may also make nursing more accessible to those with family commitments. In our university many students taking nursing and midwifery programmes are mature women who have needs over-and-above that of traditional undergraduate students. The recent expansion of higher education for UK healthcare practitioners has seen a major targeting of mature women with little evaluation of the impact that attending university has on them [13]. Kevern and Webb [13] outline their difficulties, saying that ‘greedy institutions’ (the family and higher education institutions) create conflicts for mature women that are difficult to reconcile; these conflicts are made all the more difficult when a necessary part of the overall experience of attending university is travelling to and from a distant site. E-learning makes it easier for mature women (and men) to resolve these conflicts and reconcile some of the competing demands on their time from family and other commitments.

In analysing the text for students’ participation the first session contained the most extraneous chat, and as a result the lecturer made a request for this to be stopped in future. Students remarked upon being distracted and annoyed by extraneous chat, which totalled approximately 20% of the total wordage. Lecturers and students need to become accustomed to using these technologies and it is likely that with more practice and guidance from lecturers, students will develop appropriate ‘netiquette’. This concentration on the content, and the sheer volume of purposeful words (approximately 19,000), when coupled with over 5400 purposeful interactions, shows a degree of participation and interaction with the material that is considerably higher than is likely to be in evidence during a straightforward lecture session to a large group of students, and indicates potentially a greater connection with the material and greater participation by them. These conclusions are supported by the content analysis of the free text comments from the questionnaire, where students said that they were able to concentrate more, engage more with the material, and hear better in the webcasts as compared to large group lectures.

Although it is not possible in this study to know exactly what interaction took place at home between the small groups of students viewing the webcasts together, it is likely that two levels of interaction happened, within the ‘home’ groups and between those groups and others logged in to the webcast. This is supported by the students’ free text comments, where the interaction with others in small groups was noted as a positive benefit of webcasting, with webcasting discussed as making it easier to contribute by reducing the embarrassment of speaking out in a large group. Thus in our study, we created a more flexible and effective learning environment for students which included the opportunity for greater collaboration between students and therefore, it would appear, a greater and more effective engagement with the material compared to traditional larger groups lectures, confirming these benefits postulated in the literature [1, 6, 8]. Furthermore, posting the recordings on the student intranet allowed students to view the sessions again, and six weeks after initial delivery the sessions had been accessed a total of 220 times. The first two sessions were accessed the most (87 and 102 times in the three months to December 2008) and this may represent a ‘novelty’ factor for students or that these two sessions were available within 24 hours, whilst the last two took a week to make available. Unfortunately we cannot say whether the recordings were accessed by those who attended the webcasts or lecturers, or by students singly or on many multiples of occasions. As the module assignment hand in date is eight months from the delivery of the sessions, it is possible that more students will access them again when considering their assignment preparation.

Lectures are widely used throughout UK HEI settings. It would appear that this is as much through tradition and convenience as due to systematic analysis of their educational benefits [14]. Lectures can be motivating and inspiring when students understand their relevance [15] but some argue [14] that lectures provide only didactic ‘information-giving’ and are ineffective in offering opportunities for active learning, participation and real engagement with the material under study [14]. Cook et al. undertook a meta-analysis [16] of 201 studies that showed that internet-based learning had large positive effects but outcomes similar to those found using traditional methods. However the studies included in this systematic review did not report cost or time savings. The high satisfaction ratings with all aspects of the webcasting delivery in this study indicate that webcasting is acceptable and popular and this is consistent with the literature indicating that students were amenable to delivery methods other than face-to-face lectures [4, 5, 9, 16]. Our correlations testing concerning students’ self-reported existing knowledge of the subject matter, their overall rating of the experience of attending the module by webcast and the statement ‘I gained a great deal from the webcast’ indicated that there was no correlation between the variables, and thus for our students this technology was suitable regardless of their how much they believed they knew about the sessions’ content prior to attendance by webcast. Thus we tentatively suggest that webcasting might be an effective means of securing students’ participation and engagement with taught material, and that it is of benefit in making ‘research methods’ teaching and learning interesting, which can otherwise be problematic [17], and that for our students, their pre-existing knowledge was not a factor in its success.

This study is limited by reporting only the views of those who took part in the webcast and by being from one university setting in the South West of England. Our response rates for questionnaire replies from webcast attendees require comment: although 60% responded to the first questionnaire, this decreased to 41%, 27% and 19% for subsequent sessions. This is likely to be due to ‘questionnaire fatigue’ amongst students, who became bored with, or blasé about, their completion. As our quantitative findings were based on analysis of the first questionnaire only, whilst disappointed with the low subsequent response rates, we are reasonably pleased with an initial response rate of 60%. Even so, we must acknowledge that our 40% non-response reduces the effective sample size and may therefore have introduced an element of bias [18] in that students with either very favourable or very unfavourable views on webcasting might have been motivated to reply. As our responses are very positive, it might be argued that our students with positive views towards webcasting were the ones who replied. However, a 60% response compares favourably with another study [5] which only achieved a 25% response rate. Given that two thirds chose webcasting in preference to face-to-face lectures and that the majority of those who then completed questionnaires were in favour of webcasting, we suggest that this method of teaching and learning is worthy of further trials.