As continued COVID-19 disruption looks likely across the world, perhaps until 2021, contingency plans are evolving in case of further disruption in the 2020-2021 academic year. This includes delivering face-to-face programs fully online for at least part of the upcoming academic year for new and continuing cohorts. This temporary pivot will necessitate distance teaching and learning across almost every conceivable pedagogy, from fundamental degrees to professionally accredited ones. Each institution, program, and course will have its own myriad of individualized needs; however, there is a common question that unites us all: how do we provide teaching and assessment to students in a manner that is accessible, fair, equitable, and provides the best learning whilst acknowledging the temporary nature of the pivot? No "one size fits all" solution exists, and many of the choices that need to be made will be far from simple; however, this paper provides a starting point and basic principles to facilitate discussions taking place around the globe by balancing what we know from the pedagogy of online learning with the practicalities imposed by this crisis and any future crises.

To date, there have been several attempts made to build a database of normative data for English idiomatic expressions (e.g., Libben & Titone, 2008; Titone & Connine, 1994), however, there has been some discussion in the literature as to the validity and reliability of the data obtained, particularly for decomposability ratings. Our work aimed to address these issues by looking at ratings from native and non-native speakers and to extend the deeper investigation and analysis of decomposability to other aspects of idiomatic expressions, namely familiarly, meaning and literality. Poor reliability was observed on all types of ratings, suggesting that rather than decomposability being a special case, individual variability plays a large role in how participants rate idiomatic phrases in general. Ratings from native and non-native speakers were positively correlated and an analysis of covariance found that once familiarity with an idiom was accounted for, most of the differences between native and non-native ratings were not significant. Overall, the results suggest that individual experience with idioms plays an important role in how they are perceived and this should be taken into account when selecting stimuli for experimental studies. Furthermore, the results are suggestive of the inability of speakers to inhibit the figurative meanings for idioms that they are highly familiar with.

In this review we consider the evidence concerning the impact of student access to lecture recordings. Overwhelmingly, students perceive having access to recordings as enhancing their experience and providing a flexible resource to aid their studies, deal with competing demands, and reduce anxiety. Research to date has largely focused on a binary question concerned with attendance and not the rich pedagogic tapestry revealed by the student data. There is no systematic evidence to suggest that access to recordings alone significantly impacts attendance and the impact of access to recordings on performance is related to a range of individual student characteristics such as level of study, ability, and approaches to learning. We argue that situating research in broader conceptual frameworks of student learning will prove a more fruitful approach to opening potential avenues of future research based, for example, around concepts of deep processing and distributed practice. Finally, we provide an overview of current institutional lecture capture policies and present, as a ‘starter for 10’, recommendations for guidance to support students, staff, and policy writers.

Lecture capture tends to polarise the views of academic staff. Some view it as encouraging non-attendance at lectures. Others view it as a valuable adjunct, allowing students to revisit the lecture experience and providing opportunities for clarification and repetition of key points. However, data supporting either of these stances remains scarce. Irrespective of these views, a more pertinent question pertains to the impact of lecture attendance and the use of recordings on student achievement. Findings remain unclear due to methodological issues, inconsistent findings, and a lack of differentiation of students by year of study. This paper investigated the impact of attendance, lecture recording, and student attainment across four years of an undergraduate programme. For first year students, attendance and recording use were positive predictors of performance. For weaker students, supplementary recording use was beneficial but only better students use of the recordings helped overcome the impact of low attendance. For second year students, attendance and recording use were positively correlated with, but no longer predictive of, achievement. There was no relationship for honours year students. We found no compelling evidence for a negative effect of recording use, or that attendance and recording use were related. We suggest focusing on improving lecture attendance through monitoring whilst also providing recordings for supplementary use, particularly in first year. Finally, our findings highlight the need to consider third variables such as year of study and first language when conducting and comparing lecture capture research.

Lecture capture tends to polarise the views of academic staff. Some view it as encouraging non-attendance at lectures. Others view it as a valuable adjunct, allowing students to revisit the lecture experience and providing opportunities for clarification and repetition of key points. However, data supporting either of these stances remains scarce. Irrespective of these views, a more pertinent question pertains to the impact of lecture attendance and the use of recordings on student achievement. Findings remain unclear due to methodological issues, inconsistent findings. and a lack of differentiation of students by year of study. This paper investigated the impact of attendance, lecture recording and student attainment across four years of an undergraduate programme. For first year students, attendance and recording use were positive predictors of performance. For weaker students, supplementary recording use was beneficial but only better students use of the recordings helped overcome the impact of low attendance. For second year students, attendance and recording use were positively correlated with, but no longer predictive of, achievement. There was no relationship for honours year students. We found no compelling evidence for a negative effect of recording use, or that attendance and recording use were related. We suggest focusing on improving lecture attendance through monitoring whilst also providing recordings for supplementary use, particularly in first year. Finally, our findings highlight the need to consider third variables such as year of study and first language when conducting and comparing lecture capture research.

Deaf students often lag behind hearing peers in numerical and mathematical abilities. Studies of hearing children with mathematical difficulties highlight the importance of estimation skills as the foundation for formal mathematical abilities, but research with adults is limited. Deaf and hearing college students were assessed on the Number-to-Position task as a measure of estimation, and completed standardised assessments of arithmetical and mathematical reasoning. Deaf students performed significantly more poorly on all measures, including making less accurate number-line estimates. For deaf students, there was also a strong relationship showing that those more accurate in making number-line estimates achieved higher scores on the math achievement tests. No such relationship was apparent for hearing students. Further insights into the estimation abilities of deaf individuals should be made, including tasks that require symbolic and non-symbolic estimation and which address the quality of estimation strategies being used.

Idiomatic expressions such as kick the bucket or go down a storm can differ on a number of internal features, such as familiarity, meaning, literality, and decomposability, and these types of features have been the focus of a number of normative studies. In this article, we provide normative data for a set of Bulgarian idioms and their English translations, and by doing so replicate in a Slavic language the relationships between the ratings previously found in Romance and Germanic languages. Additionally, we compared whether collecting these types of ratings in between-subjects or within-subjects designs affects the data and the conclusions drawn, and found no evidence that design type affects the final outcome. Finally, we present the results of a meta-analysis that summarizes the relationships found across the literature. As in many previous individual studies, we found that familiarity correlates with a number of other features; however, such studies have shown conflicting results concerning literality and decomposability ratings. The meta-analysis revealed reliable relationships of decomposability with a number of other measures, such as familiarity, meaning, and predictability. Conversely, literality was shown to have little to no relationship with any of the other subjective ratings. The implications for these relationships in the context of the wider experimental literature are discussed, with a particular focus on the importance of attaining familiarity ratings for each sample of participants in experimental work.

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