Vignettes from the Field
Snapshot
Elinor |
Student |
Discipline |
Psychology |
Enrolment status |
Part time, internal |
Year |
3 rd year |
Experience |
Positive |
‘The only problems I’ve ever had (with WBLT) are problems with lecturers and their attitudes to people that are using it.’ Elinor
Elinor’s story
Elinor is currently completing the third year of an undergraduate Psychology degree. She is enrolled as an internal student and studies part time in order to help manage her family commitments. She lives over an hour’s drive from campus and sometimes listens to the recorded lectures to avoid travelling.
WBLT and learning
Elinor appreciates the flexibility WBLT offers her when she studies and the reduced need for her to travel to campus. In fact she describes herself as attending face-to-face lectures ‘rarely or almost never’ and being able to ‘learn from WBLT as from face-to-face lectures.’
‘I might just have 1 lecture on a certain day, so it would’ve taken me two hours travelling to go to attend. Very often I would listen to it on iLecture instead of attending.’
WBLT is a useful study tool for Elinor. She describes the unit she’s studying as ‘moderately to very difficult’ and often uses WBLT to revise complex materials. Listening to the materials again and reinforcing them makes Elinor ‘feel a bit more confident, being able to read and go over it again.’
Impressions of using WBLT
‘It makes it so much easier, especially for people like me who come in late in life, don’t find it very easy and also have a family.’
Elinor’s experiences of using WBLT are almost always positive and she strongly agrees that the tools make it easier for her to learn and enable her to get better results. She acknowledges that some lecturers’ disapproval of WBLT is evident in their comments. For example,
‘in the recording, one lecturer very often made comments about people just listening WBLT, (suggesting) they were going to do a lot worse. That almost made me feel like I’m being lazy…if the students are listening rather than attending, I think maybe some lecturers think it reflects on them personally.’
Learning Futures
Elinor’s vision of how learning might be in the future includes replacing some of the ‘lecture’ time with recordings to free up timetabling space for smaller and more frequent tutorial groups:
‘In quite a few of my units that if they had WBLT instead of live lectures, and spent more time in tutorial work, that’d be a great benefit.’
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