University Business - April 2008 - (Page 59)

Equipment configurations for lecture capture can vary from the classroom style used at the University of Central Florida (left) to a dedicated video capture room, like the one being demonstrated by Prof. Miller at the University of Pittsburgh (right). navigated by knowing how the system and content will be used. Editing can be done to add title slides, remove dead time, or eliminate “teachable moments” that might have made sense during class but could be considered oﬀensive afterward. Long lectures can also be broken into shorter segments for use as study guides and other class aids. John Clarke, assistant dean and CIO of The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, explains that the school started capturing lectures in 2004 with a homegrown system based on a modiﬁed teleconferencing room. As students became more dependent on the archived classes, reliability became more important. “It has to be as reliable as a telephone,” he says. When Merage administrators went shopping for a commercial system, the focus was on ease of use and a desire to keep the technology in the classroom unobtrusive. They settled on Mediasite from Sonic Foundry, which dropped into the smart classrooms already in place. Although users can add information after the fact, “no one does postproduction,” says Clarke. “Students know we are just capturing what happened in the classroom.” But that is not always the case. “When you put someone in a studio room, they will start wanting to change things,” says Nick Laudato, associate director of the Instructional Technology Center for Instructional Development & Distance Education at the University of Pittsburgh. The ease of editing is one feature that drew him to Panopto’s Course Cast system. Indexing is so important, it’s a standard feature for all solutions. For ease of navigation the various systems automatically create visual thumbnails of the captured event, similar to the “select a scene” menu on a movie DVD. Most systems also allow a viewer to fast forward or rewind without accessing the thumbnails. An important part of navigation is keeping the video of the presenter and the presentation synchronized, says Sonic Foundry’s Brown, adding that his company pioneered the automatic creation of thumbnails. When navigating through a lecture, students can look at the thumbnails for a certain slide and jump directly there. In situations where the content is packaged for an iPod, the thumbnails will be universitybusiness.com visible on the video screen for ease of navigation. The value of being able to key in a search term depends on who you talk to. For a web-based solution like the one Tegrity oﬀers, faculty members upload a PowerPoint presentation in advance. Since the slides, as well as any web sites visited, are running on the same computer as the software, all the text is captured. When students are reviewing later, they can enter a keyword and search within one class or the entire course. By using a special pen and paper, notes taken during class are synchronized. Later, students can use the pen to click on their notes and the recording will automatically advance to that section. On the Panopto system, student notes taken on a computer ‘If the audio is not adequate, it reduces the usefulness.’ —John DeAngelo, Temple University are synchronized to the session either while it is being recorded or when students log in to the archive. Searching in appliance-based solutions is a little trickier. The recording is an optical, high-resolution image of what attendees saw, rather than content that was uploaded ahead of time. Brown says Sonic Foundry is developing optical capture recognition technology that can be run on a presentation after the fact to enhance search capabilities. But he says people tend to be so delighted by the thumbnails that there hasn’t been a great demand for search. Mark Jones, senior vice president of Echo360, says his company is developing similar technology for its lecture capture and publishing platform. “Lecture capture changes the role of a student in the class,” says Clarke. The student no longer has to be “a stenographer trying to write everything down.” Adoption Drivers When lecture capture is proposed, a typical concern is that students will stop attending class in favor of watching the archived April 2008 | 59 http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - April 2008

University Business - April 2008
Contents
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Editor's Note
Stats Watch
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Future Shock
On The Hill
Facilities Focus
Independent Outlook
Ready, Set, Respond
Small Steps to Safety
Admissions
Lecture Capture: A Fresh Look
Internet Technology
What's New
Calendar of Events
End Note

University Business - April 2008