Frequently asked questions

LR+ is an agile and dynamic learning environment that offers multiple benefits to both the instructors and learners. To view the integrated student engagement tools, compare learning with and without LR+ and to choose the implementation strategies for your class, click here.

• Dashboard – Shows an overview of all courses for which you have instructor access. The instructor can also view if students have posted any new questions or identify students who are falling behind class and look at the overall engagement data of the course. You can also review past classes or prepare for the upcoming class. 
• Library – Displays a list of all resources that you have uploaded to LR+ or resources that have been shared with you.
• Courses – Displays a drop-down menu of all courses that you can access.
• Classes – Lists all the lectures of the course. The term used by LR+ for lectures is classes.
• Q&A – This is used to post questions to students, endorse questions and respond to their questions or discussions.
• Analytics – Provides real-time data on how students are engaging with the resources in the class. This can be viewed as the whole class or for individual students.
• Settings – Can be used to enter more details and descriptions of the course.

More information can be found here.

• Interactive slides with embedded activities.
• Discussions panel allows instructors and learners to post questions and endorse answers that are correct or highlight questions that need more attention. Note that when learners post anonymously, the details of the person are only anonymous to the class and not to the instructor.
• Confused flags allow learners to indicate confusion over slides or any part of the video. This can be viewed later in the Analytics.

Yes. All content from the old ESS system has since been migrated to LR+. ESS was decommissioned in December 2017. 

To view the list of venues that are enabled for lecture recording, please click here.

For timetabled courses (except Medicine and Law faculties), please contact your school/faculty timetabling officer. Instructions on how they can do this can be found here. Login credentials will be the zID and zPass. 

For courses within Undergraduate Medicine (MFAC) and Non-Timetabled (Ad-Hoc) recordings, please contact the IT Service Centre.

Can I opt out of recordings?
Yes. Once you opt out, your lectures for that class will not be recorded. Note that you can also choose to record, and not make the recordings available to students. Staff can manage this from myUNSW or by contacting their school timetabling staff. Please consider the following reasons for recording your lectures:

• Sharing with specific students who have personal cases that justify this requirement, such as inability to attend due to illness
• Sharing with all students prior to the exam period to support their lecture revision
• Keeping the lecture recordings for your own self-reflection
• Keeping the lecture recordings as evidence for future promotion
• Keeping the lecture recordings for use in a future trimester, for example to "sub in" for a day you are unavailable to deliver a lecture

Should you still wish to opt-out completely:

Note: To cancel one-off recording requests (i.e. Recordings outside of normal teaching times) such as guest speakers, special events etc. As these are scheduled by the IT Service Centre, you must contact them to arrange for such sessions to be cancelled if required.

The following policies will assist you to make informed decisions while planning for lessons:

• Archive policy
• Opt-out policy
• Copyright policy
• Privacy policy

Click here for more information on these policies.

When a lecture is completed, the capture appliance in the venue must finish the raw file, process it into a more usable format, and then upload it to cloud servers for additional processing. Once complete, it will become available in your interface automatically.

As lectures generally start/stop at the same time, a large number of lectures go to the servers for processing at the same time, particularly at peak times of the day. While the size of the queue can impact how long each lecture takes to process, but the cloud will detect lengthy delays and automatically spring up additional servers to deal with the queue on the fly.

The size of the lecture and video content determines how long it will take to process, but its usually available within a couple of hours.

We generally recommend waiting > 24 hours before raising any incidents. This is because when a processing issue occurs, the service has it's own self-healing capabilities, and one of these will restart the full process at the 24 hour mark, which is often successful.

We recommend that all lecture recordings are scheduled to be 1 or 2 hours of duration, and not longer. For example, a 4 hour lecture could be scheduled for recording as 2 x 2 lecture recordings.

This is because:

1. Usability - A long lecture split up into smaller lecture recordings can make it easier for students to keep track. Also, and this depends on the course design to be fully effective, each lecture recording can have its own focus and related questions/notes.
    
2. Reliability - While quite rare, the scheduling of large lecture recordings can result in the entire lecture failing, or in the least having technical issues that prevent its timely processing. Hence breaking them up into smaller lectures will improve reliability and faster processing time.

Note, UNSW's lecture scheduling policy will mean a 5-10 minute gap will exist in between lecture recordings. While this is generally designed to give students the ability to leave one classroom and arrive at the next, it is also required to ensure back to back lecture recordings are completed successfully. Without this gap, the capture appliances may not finish the previous lecture recording processing, and thus fail to start the next lecture recording.

Consequently, we recommend that the scheduling gap is managed through the use of a short break at the 2 hour mark.

If you are an instructor as well as a student in your institution, you can change the role from an instructor to student using the menu bar of LR+.  Note that LR+ and Moodle are two different platforms.

• Click on your name on the top right hand corner of the menu bar.
• Click Change
• Change role to desired type

The analytics of a course is calculated by measuring the engagement of students with 6 different components. These are; Attendance, Video views, Presentation views, Q&A, Notes and Activities. The weighting of these 6 components can be adjusted on the ALP site. Data from this feature helps instructors decide on the following:

• Important elements of the class
• What caused students to engage more
• What interested students the least etc.

Further details on the Analytics available for instructors can be found here. 

Yes, however, note that creating a class on ALP does not schedule a recording automatically. You can use the "New Class" option of LR+ to use its interactive abilities. For more information on creating new classes, please click here. 

The service is installed in a limited number of venues and is not available by default.

Please contact the Education Technology Services (ETS) team for more information.

You will be able to link to the correct course or delete links to an incorrect course by clicking on "Reset Moodle Link" located in the "Classes" tab of your course. Once this is done, you will have to navigate back to the course main page and click on the LR+ activity to link to the correct course.

The lecture recordings are automatically available to students if this has been opted for, in myUNSW. You will need to add the Lecture Recordings+ activity in your Moodle course so that students may access the lectures. Further details on how to share the recordings for students on Moodle can be found here. 

Yes. This will be possible if your recordings are configured to Available when complete in myUNSW.

Yes. Navigate to the video you want to edit, click on the video icon and select Edit Video. More information can be found here. 

Yes. This can be configured in the "Availability" settings of the video. You may choose to make the video available to certain students only or after a certain date. More information can be found here.

Yes, Echo360 provides a free stand-alone application Universal Capture: Personal that runs on either Windows or Mac and allows you to create recordings to supplement your in-class materials. More information on how to install, configure, record and upload can be found here.

You must first create a direct Echo360 password, prior to being able to sign in via the Echo Microsoft PowerPoint ribbon tool. Detailed instructions may be found on the following page underneath Teaching with presentation slides.

Unfortunately, all animations, transitions, equation and molecular structure generating abilities will either be lost or altered when ppts are uploaded to ALP.  However, this can be avoided if you present your lecture using the normal ppt instead of uploading it to ALP. Since LR+ will record the screen on the primary projector, you can deliver the lecture from a ppt file in your storage device (USB or desktop). You may also choose to use the ppt slides and the interactive activities of LR+ simultaneously and this will be recorded accordingly depending on the content that is projected on the screen.

In addition, you can also download the ppt ribbon (windows users only). This will allow you to maintain the animations, transitions and other builds while delivering presentations using LR+. To download the ppt Echo ribbon, click here. 

1. Navigate to the class to which you want to attach the ppt.
2. Click on the add presentation button and upload from a storage device. Note that a class on ALP can only have one ppt presentation.

Yes. LR+ allows you to add/delete slides, add media slides or add an activity slide.

Yes, the following activities may be added to your presentation. 

• Multiple Choice
• Short Answer
• Image Quiz
• Ordered List
• Numerical Questions

Further details on this can be found here. 

Download the latest Echo360 application from either the Apple Store, Google Play or Windows Store. Once installed, the app will request you enter your school assigned email address. Please enter your primary UNSW email address within this field. Once confirmed, the app will redirect you to UNSW's authentication page where you can then sign in.

If you have multiple roles within Echo, upon signing in via the app, it will prompt you to select the role you wish to sign in as. To then switch roles, you must first log out of the application and sign back in. To log out, select the 3 horizontal lines icon located on the top left of your screen and select logout. 

UNSW Lecture Recordings+ (LR+) is an educational technology that supports engaged learning in lecture-based courses, flipped classrooms, and blended or fully online courses.