Towards a personalised learning mesh: the implementation of a low overhead, multipath learning tool

Many studies have shown that students today live in an environment of multiple, simultaneous, short-lived stimuli which they access from wherever they may be. However institutional teaching is still based on traditional, long, sequential, attended presentations. In order to bridge that gap, there have been a number of moves over the past few years to develop and integrate lecture capture into the learning environment. Often these systems are large and require a major commitment from the institution in terms of licences and infrastructure. Given the constrained financial environment for many academic institutions, these systems are not a viable option for many. The authors have extended their normal lecture capture activity in their teaching to form an integrated learning resource. The captured media is mounted into a content management system which allows the media to be repurposed along with other content to provide an integrated support tool for student enquiry and self study which better matches their unstructured social experience. This paper describes the development of the pilot system based on a minimal hardware requirement and limited post processing. The evolution of the system pilot is described and the development of the specification which then led to the live prototype is discussed. Issues that impact on the effectiveness of the prototype are covered and the strategy (based on classroom feedback) for developing the prototype into a full system for deployment across a range of desktop and mobile platforms is introduced.