Webcasts as an element of blended learning

How do students study with webcasts? How do the new media change their ways of learning? How can video, sound, multimedia and text be combined optimally to produce a learning environment that is attractive, stylish, and productive of deep learning, for students, trainees and practitioners? In this paper we focus on three different uses of webcast learning. Webcasts as a replacement for lectures in a blended learning module, webcasts used in electronic tutorials and webcasts as part of a completely on-line module. We shall demonstrate briefly the functionality of these environments, then summarise some of the user feedback data we have gathered. Our findings verify a number of approaches to learning advocated by the phenomenographical literature, and we shall summarise this. Throughout,
Note: PMIC denotes a session that focus on Promoting and Managing Institutional Change 19
we offer practical guidelines to the use of webcasts in VLEs, and discuss the extent to which such environments can be used successfully in legal education and training.