EDU IT: Free access to 2,400 international video lectures
Good news for teaching staff and digital teaching activities at Health. AU Library has subscribed to a trial subscription of the HSTalks – Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection videotek containing more than 2,400 video lectures with some of the leading experts within the field of medicine and life sciences.
The many video lectures in HSTalks could provide one possibility of integrating educational IT in the teaching activities.
"Video recordings and screencast presentations have shown themselves to be valuable for both students and lecturers, such as we have seen in the dermatology teaching at medicine. With access to HSTalks, we also incorporate the international dimension with top researchers from the best educational institutions reviewing knowledge and theories from their research area on video," says Mads Roald Dahl from the EDU IT group at CESU.
EDU IT is one of the largest strategic focus areas – and not just for Health, but for the entire university, as modern learning technologies have been shown to support the possibilities of high learning outcomes for the students.
"With access to HSTalks we’re strengthening the video and multimedia area. In the long term, we expect more of the teaching activities at Health to be supplemented by or based on proprietary video material," says Mads Roald Dahl.
See the two articles “Video adds a new dimension to the teaching" and "Aarhus University invests in digital development of teaching activities".
Knowledge on video
The video lectures in HSTalks are divided into series, subject areas and areas of treatment and the system has several advantages in the implementation of teaching activities:
- The videotek offers free matching of a curriculum with the relevant videos if the lecturer does not have the time to watch complete videos.
- The videos or extracts from them can be integrated directly in Blackboard and/or in PowerPoint presentations.
- There is IP access from campus, remote access via a proxy server and direct access from Blackboard via referral URLs, so there should not be any access issues.
- All video lectures are searchable in the library catalogue. They are indexed in the same way as e-books.
- Direct link to the HSTalks: https://hstalks-com.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk:12048/biosci/.
Feedback – yes please
The trail subscription to HSTalks lasts for the remainder of the year, and the idea with the long test period is to give the teaching staff at Health an opportunity to experiment with integrating video lectures in the autumn lectures and teaching activities.
"We hope that many of our lecturers want to and have the opportunity to try out HSTalks and give us qualified feedback during the test period. The system is not that cheap, and we really want to find out whether the product supports the blended learning form of instruction and whether it’s worth investing in," says Librarian Lone Skovsgaard Aidt.
HSTalks covers these categories:
- Biochemistry
- Cancer
- Cell Biology
- Clinical Medicine
- Diseases, Disorders & Treatments
- Genetics & Epigenetics
- Immunology
- Metabolism & Nutrition
- Methods
- Microbiology
- Neuroscience
- Omics & Systems Biology
- Pharmaceutical Sciences
- Reproduction & Development
Contact, questions and feedback to
Librarian Lone Skovsgaard Aidt
Aarhus University, AU Library, Health Sciences
Tel.: (+45) 8946 2374
Email: lsa@kb.dk