University Business Case Study: Lecture capture is enhancing teaching and learning
Friday, September 9, 2011
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Diverse Issues in Higher Education: Commentary: Historically Black Colleges and Universities Are Vital to a Diverse U.S. Workforce
September 7, 2011
by Dr. Karl Reid
Brown v. Board of Education, followed by 20 years of court decisions, federal legislation and regulatory enforcement that pushed open the door of opportunity for African-Americans to attend colleges that had once been inaccessible, has led to significant increases in minorities earning degrees.
These efforts led some to question the need for and the contemporary relevance of HBCUs — institutions that had previously been among the few higher education options for African-Americans.
Today, the questions linger.
An editorial last fall in the Wall Street Journal, for example, asserted that while HBCUs were a necessity at one point because of racism, “The reality today … is that there’s no shortage of traditional colleges willing to give Black students a chance.” Like many who question the relevance of HBCUs, the critique was long on supposition and inference, and short on data and evidence.
To be sure, some HBCUs have appropriately endured criticism centered on low graduation rates, financial challenges, low alumni giving and periodic accreditation difficulties. And yet UNCF (United Negro College Fund) has demonstrated since the 2006 launch of its Institute for Capacity Building that with targeted investment in critical areas, combined with technical assistance and training, some of these same institutions can show marked improvements in enrollment, retention, alumni giving, faculty development and accreditation.
And these improvements are sustained through the establishment of communities of practice via learning institutes and social networking vehicles.
More than a year ago, the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, the research arm of UNCF, sought to address such critiques by launching a research agenda, which aimed both to study the challenges that HBCUs face in the 21st century and to make the contemporary case for HBCUs. Its first publication, Students Speak! Understanding the Value of HBCUs from Student Perspectives, funded by the Mellon Foundation, was an interview study of students attending 16 UNCF member HBCUs. It reported a relatively new phenomenon: Whereas a vast majority of previous generations of HBCU students chose them because they wanted to extend their racial majority high school experience, many students who choose HBCUs today come from predominantly White high schools. The students in the latter group want a different milieu to help facilitate both their formal education and their search for racial and ethnic identity.
The UNCF Patterson Research Institute agenda also seeks to understand the larger role HBCUs play in addressing national challenges. Here again, we let the data speak. The Institute is about to release a new report, Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Vital Resource for a Diverse and Competitive American Workforce, that outlines the role of these institutions in producing workplace- and postgraduate education-ready graduates.
Here are the highlights of the new report:
• Though representing just 4 percent of the nation’s public and private not-for profit four-year institutions, HBCUs enroll 21 percent of African-American college students, and grant 22 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to African-Americans. HBCUs account for more than a fifth of all African- American undergraduates.
• In the all-important STEM fields, HBCUs do even better, conferring 28 percent of STEM bachelor’s degrees, and 34 percent of degrees awarded to African-Americans with majors in physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and biology.
These outcomes, by the way, are not the result of soft grading or social promotion, but are validated at the postgraduate level. According to a recent report by the National Science Foundation, eight of the top 10 colleges whose African-American graduates went on to get Ph.D.s in science and engineering disciplines were HBCUs.
Remarkably, these institutions achieve their successes despite an average student profile that introduces greater challenges to collegiate success. As the report will highlight, HBCUs are three times more likely to educate students from households with annual incomes under $25,000, and willingly accept a population that scores roughly 20 percent lower than their non- HBCU peers at the 75th SAT percentile.
In a job market that increasingly requires postsecondary education as an entry-level requirement, what could be more relevant than HBCUs’ commitment to enrolling students from largely low-income and academically underprepared backgrounds and “overproducing” graduates and doctoral students?
What, then, does the evidence — not the suppositions — tell us? That having produced, over 150 years, generations of leaders who have helped shape the fabric of America, HBCUs stand on as strong a footing today, if not stronger, than they did 40 years ago. Education does not have to be a zero-sum proposition where one type of institution wins and another loses. Rather, with increased policy and financial support for HBCUs, this could be a win-win-win opportunity — America wins, higher education wins and students win. The burden is on those who speak up for HBCUs and their students to let the evidence speak and hope that Americans are listening.
— Dr. Karl Reid is senior vice president of academic programs and strategic initiatives for the UNCF.
HBCUdigest.com: FEMA Greenlights $20 Million for SUNO Post-Katrina Restoration
September 9, 2011
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has approved additional project worksheets (PWs) totaling approximately$20 million toward the rebuilding of Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO). This figure represents an addition to the original obligated or approved PWs that were determined to be $92 million ($64 million of which to be used towards permanent replacement of four new academic buildings) by the time of U.S Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s second visit to SUNO’s campus in August 2009, bringing the new total obligated amount for SUNO since the Storm to $112 million.
“It is good to see that FEMA has finally provided additional funding for permanent buildings on SUNO’s main campus and temporary structures on its Lake campus,” said U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu. “In 2009, I visited the campus with Secretary Napolitano and last year, I sent a letter to FEMA requesting additional funding for these facilities. The funding approved by FEMA will help SUNO complete its recovery from Hurricane Katrina and allow it to maintain the outstanding reputation it has built up over the past half-century.”
Approximately $12 million of the new funding will be used to supplement the permanent construction of the four new academic buildings. The buildings include the Millie M. Charles School of Social Work, College of Education and Human Development, Sciences, and Arts & Humanities buildings.
The remaining funds will assist the Louisiana Office of Facility Planning & Control (FP&C) to proceed with construction of new, temporary modular buildings on SUNO’s Lake Campus. The new modular facilities will replace the ones that FEMA constructed for SUNO’s use in 2006. As repairs to Park Campus buildings are completed, SUNO community members will transition from the modular buildings and occupy the permanent facilities.
“SUNO has worked closely with FEMA, FP&C and Senator Landrieu’s office for a very long time to reach this milestone on the road to the University’s full recovery. This bodes well for our recovery and rebuilding effort going forward,” said Victor Ukpolo, SUNO’s chancellor.
According to FEMA public assistance officer Eddie Williams, the funding awarded to SUNO will not be impacted by current immediate needs funding restrictions due to a designation of the monies being categorized as emergency work.
“We are one step closer to providing a more suitable short and long term situation for the students and faculty of SUNO,” said Williams. “We are currently working with the FP&C project manager to gather all invoices associated with this work so that it can be appropriately captured in the PWs. These projects represent the highest priorities of SUNO and Chancellor Ukpolo. As always, FEMA is committed to ensuring that SUNO’s recovery is fast-tracked where possible and that maximum latitude is provided to allow for an expeditious recovery process.”
Jerry Jones, assistant commissioner of FP&C, expressed thanks to FEMA for finalizing this agreement, and looks forward to seeing the University recover fully.
“I hope that we can all stand together for the ribbon cutting and rededication and rebirth of the campus and the vital role it serves in this community as a safety net, higher education institution,” said Jones.
EmergingEdTech Lecture Capture Series
Learning about Lecture Capture Technology
by K. Walsh on February 21, 2010
http://www.emergingedtech.com/2010/02/learning-about-lecture-capture-tools-and-technologies/
Learning about Lecture Capture – Part 2 (features and functions)
by K. Walsh on February 28, 2010 http://www.emergingedtech.com/2010/02/learning-about-lecture-capture-part-2-features-and-functions/
Lecture Capture Part 3: Looking for scalable entry-level options
by K. Walsh on March 7, 2010 http://www.emergingedtech.com/2010/03/lecture-capture-part-3-looking-for-scalable-entry-level-options/
Campus Technology: Lecture Capture: Lights! Camera! Action!
As lecture capture becomes commonplace on campus, faculty discuss how it’s changing the way they teach, spurring in-class dialogue, and forcing them to become better instructors.
By John K. Waters06/01/11
Advanced capture technology has become almost ubiquitous in higher education: If your institution doesn't have it, chances are that you're trailing the competition. Students want it. Tech-savvy teachers like it. And blended learning environments practically demand it.
The most commonly touted benefit of these systems is that they are student centered. Capturing, indexing, publishing, and storing class lectures in online repositories, vendors say, provide students with a resource that improves learning outcomes. But you rarely hear about the effect this technology is having on the people in front of the camera. Has lecture capture changed the way instructors teach? And, if so, has it improved the quality of their teaching?
"What we're seeing is the accelerated death of the lecture as we know it," comments Stephen Laster, CIO of Harvard Business School (MA). "I think that's a good thing, but my concern is that we do it in ways that add to learning and teaching effectiveness. Otherwise, all we're doing is adding cost and complexity."
Laster argues that the value of lecture capture--any technology, really--depends entirely on the pedagogy to which it is applied.
Lecture capture hasn't had much of an impact at HBS, Laster suspects, because the institution has long embraced a case-based approach to teaching and learning. "For many years, our classrooms have been about engagement and action," he says. "We don't do lectures, and haven't done them for a while."
Laster feels that lecture capture really comes into its own in those courses that teach the fundamentals to large classes. "Lecture capture as a replacement for the 400-student experience in the lecture hall can make a lot of sense," he explains. "But where you have a more interactive classroom style, it doesn't make sense."
Interestingly, faculty at many institutions now see lecture capture as a way to help transform those large classes into the kind of interactive learning experience that Laster describes.
Front-Loading Lectures
Deirdre Jones, associate director of innovative outreach technologies for the College of Business at the University of Toledo (OH), says her school first embraced lecture capture for its potential as a study aid, but that it has clearly changed the way she teaches. Because the technology essentially separates the lecture from the class, Jones is able to front-load her lectures, making them available for students to review online before class. She then uses class time for group discussions.
"I prerecord some lectures on an upcoming topic, and I keep recordings of past guest speakers who were particularly good and reuse them," she explains. "I say, 'Okay, watch these lectures, then we'll use the class period for discussion purposes.' I don't have to be--or want to be--the Sage on the Stage. I think this approach has helped to improve the dynamics of the classroom experience."
Anne-Marie Lerner, an assistant professor in the engineering department at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, is also experimenting with prerecorded lectures, and reports that her colleagues have used them with great success. She does sound one word of warning, though: The practice of prerecording lectures, she says, has the potential to increase course content above and beyond the credit hours listed in the catalog. The types of prerecorded videos that tend to work best, she says, cover such topics as how-tos for using lab equipment or theoretical instruction that can then be followed by an in-class discussion section.
In the experience of Garret Brand, professor of law and director of distance learning and instructional technologies at Grand Rapids Community College (MI), making his lectures available online for students before class has given him more of a precious commodity: free class time. He also finds that he's less concerned about pacing the lecture so his students can keep up with their note taking.
"My students don't seem to be taking notes as much as they used to, because they can replay the lecture," he says. "They no longer need notes as a record-keeping tool. And seeing that, I've found that I'm adjusting my lecture style, spending less time on the stuff they can get online."
Chris Mizell, a mathematics professor at Northwest Florida State College, made a similar adjustment when he began using lecture capture in 2008.
"I find myself not being quite as worried about copying every little aspect of each definition onto the board," he says, "because I know that the students can go back and get all the details from the captured lecture. It saves me time to focus on the problem solving without having to fill in as many details."
Polishing One’s Performance
Lecture capture is changing more than how faculty structure their classes, however. It's actually altering how instructors handle themselves at the front of the room. Lerner began teaching in a lecture-capture-enabled classroom in spring 2009, and she's convinced that the technology has made her a better lecturer.
"Lecture capture is an incredible tool for self-reflection," she notes. "Class time for an instructor can be a bit of a blur, and this technology gives you an unbiased eye--that impartial feedback that even a colleague watching you cannot provide. It's definitely made me much more cognizant of the way I communicate ideas, which I'm certain is making me a better instructor."
Perfecting Your Solo
Anne-Marie Lerner, an assistant professor in the engineering department at theUniversity of Wisconsin-Platteville, says that lecture capture has made her a better performer, literally.
"When I first started doing lecture capture, I just ignored the camera and focused on the students," she says. "I thought the camera doesn't give you feedback. Well, it turns out that when you're looking around the room at your students, making sure they're following you, you look really shifty in the video, because you're never looking at the camera. You can't ignore the camera, because that's where your students will have that one-on-one experience--and not just the off-campus students. Even the local students will be going back to the recording later to review the lecture from Old Shifty Eyes."
Lerner found inspiration to improve her lectures from an unexpected source: late-night talk show hosts.
"It's the same setup," she says. "They all have live studio audiences, and the people in the audience seem to be having a great personal experience. But the host isn't looking at them. When the host does occasionally break eye contact with the camera and talk to the audience, we, the viewers, feel left out. I've found that looking at the camera about 70 percent of the time and your students 30 percent of the time is the right ratio."
This is not to say that college professors should be working on stand-up routines, Lerner hastens to add.
"No one needs to become Jay Leno to make this work," she says. "But lecture capture is forcing people to up their game. It forces you to address a skill set that you might not have thought much about, or not for a long time. And I think it's going to cause people to look at their curriculum and ask how they can use this technology to serve their students better."
And don't confuse "eye contact" with "attention," Lerner continues. "The camera is where I put my eyes, but my attention is always on my students," she explains. "One reason I give so much focus to the camera is that my students are mostly watching the screen or the board and internalizing what I’ve written. And the truth is, most students get weirded out when you make too much eye contact with them."
"A college lecture is definitely a performance," agrees Deirdre Jones, associate director of innovative outreach technologies for the College of Business at the University of Toledo (OH). "Watching yourself on tape can be a tough experience the first time. I had one faculty member come up to me and say, 'I love the system, but you have to make me an avatar. Nobody wants to look at this old, fat white guy; I need you to make me look like Brad Pitt!' He was being silly, of course, but he was pointing to a genuine concern.
"Some faculty members have noticed that they pace awkwardly, that they use 'um' or filler words, that they don’t make eye contact with their students. I play with the change in my pockets. We all have little things that we can improve upon."
Seeing oneself through the cold prism of a camera can definitely be an eye-opening experience for many faculty. "It's been interesting to see some little mannerisms I have that I hadn't been aware of," notes Mizell.
The benefits of self-analysis are certainly not lost on lecture capture vendors. "You can't have your lectures captured and made available for consumption by students later and not have that change you as a teacher in some way," claims Sean Brown, VP of education at Sonic Foundry.
Brown likens the effect of lecture capture on the quality of teaching to the impact of television on the performance of pro football players. His father, Aaron Brown, was a professional football player from 1966 to 1975, a defensive end who played for the Kansas City Chiefs in the first and fourth Super Bowls.
"He told me that once the players started seeing themselves on TV, they started improving themselves," recalls Brown. "He said, 'The bigger the venue, the harder you want to play.' Teachers were doing their best before lecture capture came along, I'm certain of that. But now they have a bigger venue."
Still nervous about lecturing in front of the camera? In "10 Tips to Improve On-Camera Performance," five lecture capture pros offer their advice on how to make the most of your time in the spotlight.
Faculty Fears and Peer Review
Fear of that bigger arena fueled some of the initial resistance to lecture capture among faculty at West Virginia University's Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center, believes Eric Coffman, the school's manager of application development.
"At first, a lot of instructors were just plain afraid of it," Coffman reports. "They didn't want to have their faces on TV, that sort of thing. But over time, as they began hearing their students demand access to this resource, they started coming to us and asking how they could use it."
Anxiety about stepping in front of a camera can be further exacerbated if the technology is complex or hard to use. In recent years, however, lecture capture technology has become far more automated and user friendly.
"Anyone with even the slightest Luddite tendencies tends to be put off by any demands beyond 'push this button,'" says Lerner. "The fact that this technology is so simple is one of the big reasons it's being used."
Toledo’s Jones agrees. "There has been a co-evolution of the technology and the attitude toward it," she says. "I'm not sure you can separate the slick, easy-to-use, web-based systems we have now from the adoption rates. In fact, we should stop calling this stuff lecture capture. It can capture anything: an event, an applied learning project, a guest speaker, debriefing sessions, interviews, or a focus group."
And, at some colleges, it's helping faculty study one another. While no institutions appear to be using lecture capture as part of a formal faculty-review process, several schools have seen the technology emerge as a valuable tool for peer review.
"All medical school professors can view all medical school courses, carte blanche," says Coffman of the setup at WVU Health Sciences. "And part of their job is to review each other's content, to make sure they're not teaching the same thing and that something isn't getting missed. That's something lecture capture has enabled."
At Grand Rapids CC, says Brand, the technology has also been useful for creating short tutorials for faculty development, and for evaluating the performance of students in an online instructor-certification course.
"The faculty is very open in that setting," says Brand of the tutorials. "I think it's easier, because it's largely screen capture and not a talking head."
Do Students Benefit?
Ultimately, though, the benefits of lecture capture--freeing up extra time for class discussion, as a study aid, and improving faculty performance--have one primary goal: to improve student learning.
Many faculty instinctively feel that lecture capture has improved student learning, even if they themselves can't prove it. Most of the claims for the technology come from student surveys, which indicate an overwhelming embrace of lecture capture. In a 2010 internal survey at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, 96 percent of student respondents declared that they wanted lecture capture brought to more classrooms. Another, vendor-sponsored survey of 9,000 students from more than 200 institutions revealed that 95 percent of students believe that lecture capture provides a "significant improvement in effectiveness of studying."
Student popularity doesn't automatically translate into better learning outcomes, however. As an example, Charles Calahan, assistant clinical professor in the College of Health and Human Sciences at Purdue University (IN), cites ones of his classes where in-class activities account for 8 percent of the grade. "If a student is really concerned about his grade, he's going to be in class," he explains. "But I think a student could miss every class period, catch the content on Echo360, and probably get a B or B+." As a result, Calahan is reconsidering how he currently uses lecture capture, and may alter some of his teaching practices.
For many faculty, lecture capture boils down to this: At its most basic, the technology is useful as a study aid, and provides students with a whole new level of flexibility--a flexibility that some will undoubtedly abuse. Used to its fullest potential, however, lecture capture goes far beyond this, giving faculty the ability to restructure the very format of their classes and how they teach them.
"What's the most constrained resource in higher ed?" posits Harvard's Laster, in response to a question about the potential benefits of lecture capture. "Faculty time."
How an institution's faculty use that extra time is what will probably set the good teachers apart.
Lecture Capture Vendors
Lecture capture isn't a new concept. College and university professors have been videotaping their courses for about 25 years. But in the past 10 years--thanks to the advent of warp-speed processors, broadband connectivity, and cloud-based data storage--the technology for recording and publishing class lectures has evolved dramatically.
The current lineup of lecture capture solutions includes products that rely on proprietary hardware, specialized software platforms, web-based systems, and combinations of all three. Profiled below are a few of the principal vendors.
Accordent
This Polycom company offers a line of rich-media-creation software for course capture, online archiving, course preparation, and exam prep. Its lecture capture solutions allow educators to deliver live webcasts for distance-learning programs and on-demand materials for study. Students access the content via a web portal, and a management console allows administrators to control and measure how students use the materials.
Echo360
The EchoSystem features a mix of hardware and software, including an HD recorder, an Adobe Flash-based playback system, and a web portal. The system enables "a la carte recording choices" based on the type of curriculum, instructor preferences, and the technical complexity of the venue involved. Links to lecture recordings are automatically published to systems such as Blackboard, Moodle, iTunes U, and custom portals with the EchoSystem open-publishing software-development kit.
Panopto
The company's Focus system is an easy-to-use lecture capture solution that allows professors to capture, edit, stream, archive, and share recordings without calling the IT department. The system can capture streaming video, audio, PowerPoint, and screen components--all of which can be organized into presentations that students can search, reference, and review on demand from any location. The vendor touts the system as being "student-centric," with text-based search and note-taking capabilities.
Sonic Foundry
This vendor is best known for its Mediasite lecture capture solution, a hardware-based product with a purpose-built digital recorder that is designed to integrate with a school's existing A/V equipment, including document cameras, laptops, tablets, Smart Boards, and others. Recordings, stored in the cloud via the Mediasite EX Server, can be streamed live or made available on demand. The system includes editing tools for cutting, cropping, fading, or replacing video and slide content.
TechSmith
TechSmith's Camtasia Relay is a software system that records audio and on-screen activities from live lectures, presentations, and meetings from a Mac or PC, and automatically publishes the content to the web. Content is stored on a Camtasia Relay Server, which automatically transcribes recorded audio into captions. Professors can view and edit the captions, and even publish video with closed captions in Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. The transcriptions also make the videos keyword searchable. The system automatically adds a Blackboard or Moodle announcement when a recording is published.
Tegrity
The company bills its Tegrity Campus product as a "campuswide class-capture web service." The entire product is web based. The content repository is accessed via a browser, an iPod, or other mobile devices. The system is designed to eliminate both the need for manual installations and maintenance of server and recording software, and classroom-based A/V gear. The company was recently acquired by McGraw-Hill Education.
Campus Technology: Lecture Capture Is Getting Campuses Talking
Drexel University in Philadelphia, Utrecht University in The Netherlands, the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston, and the University of Bath have all gone public in the last several months with deployments of lecture capture systems within classrooms. Do those increasingly common installations define a new baseline operating requirement for institutions of higher education, or are they simply a new feature that some schools are dabbling in?
Lecture capture, proclaimed Alan Greenberg, analyst and partner for Wainhouse Research, "is one of the hottest things to come along since WiFi or the iPhone." After all, why sit in a classroom to watch a lecture when you could be doing the same thing from the laundry room, in a shady spot on the commons, or during a break in a part-time job?
It's not simply offline review of course material that students find so compelling. "It's great," said Nicole Engelbert, lead analyst with Datamonitor. "You turn to your neighbor to talk about football, and you miss the faculty member going over how to calculate standard deviation. So you just go back to the captured lecture, search for 'standard deviation,' and up pops up on your screen a whiteboard where Dr. Smith was laying it all out."
Why Lecture Capture Is Gaining Traction
According to an informal survey of higher education professionals done by CampusTechnology.com in 2008, only 33 percent of institutions routinely made captured lectures available to students online.
That count is quickly increasing. According to Greenberg, two factors are driving the "stampede of interest" in lecture capture: First, students are asking for it. A survey (PDF) by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in September 2008 found that 82 percent of students prefer courses with an online option.
Second, higher education tends to be competitive. If a school aspires to compete for new students who are also considering an institution that provides lecture capture, it'll want to be able to provide and promote those capabilities too.
Plus, added Engelbert, the technology is attractively priced. "In the grand scheme, it's not the most expensive solution," she said. As an example, an institution could purchase a basic package of Camtasia Relay, the lecture capture system from TechSmith, for $4,995. That system could handle encoding of 13 hours worth of courses in a day to be delivered in three formats: Web video, iPod video, and WMV; the same system, according to the vendor, could process 50 hours of courses in a day if formatted strictly for Web video.
While half of the audience for recorded courses consists of distance or remote learners who are accessing content online both live--as part of a webstream--and asynchronously, the other half consists of on-campus students, said Greenberg, citing the findings of an unnamed state college. Those students are doing their own "time-shifting," he explained. "Or it's often simply that they want to go back and access [the lecture] for review. You're a medical student, an intern. It's two in the morning. You remember a class you took, a procedure you saw, and you want to review it in the downtime between seeing patients."
Some proponents of lecture capture have suggested that the existence of the recording means that students don't need to spend all their time in class taking notes and can participate more fully as the class unfolds.
The Adoption Process
Lecture capture systems record and archive content delivered in the classroom, including audio (such as the faculty member's lecture), computer feeds (the presentation), and sometimes video (the faculty member doing work on the whiteboard). The student can then review the class and search its contents later via a browser on a computer or as a file downloaded to some other kind of device.
As Greenberg wrote in a recent Wainhouse report, "The Distance Education and e-Learning Landscape," lecture capture was an outgrowth of the streaming business, which tended to focus on audio and video delivery. Some streaming companies recognized that adding other forms of content--PowerPoints, Flash animations, video clips, polls and surveys, and the like--would serve a primary customer base--colleges and universities--very well.
The earliest adopters tended to be professional degree programs, and that trend still continues, said Greenberg. Business, medicine, law, and other professional schools appear to be most interested in embracing the technology currently.
Growing faculty acceptance has proven to be a major component of running a successful lecture capture program. "We've gone from people in higher education being totally averse to packaging of intellectual property--of them. They were petrified," said Greenberg. "Now they get it more and more. They understand that there's value to it. They see the applications. They see the benefits. So there's greater openness. That's in the context where the university is making it available to their current learners and using it as a recruiting tool."
Faculty use of lecture capture has also grown as the systems have become easier to use. Said Datamonitor's Engelbert, typically, beginning the capture process requires nothing more than "having the faculty member press a button or turn on a computer. It's done automatically. In the realm of technology, that's really nice."
Ease of use provides a threshold for turning lecture capture from a nice-to-have into a need-to-have campus feature, Greenberg explained. He recently saw a vendor demonstration of a system that starts the capture process by pushing a thumb drive into a USB port. When the thumb drive is pulled out, the capture process ends. "It's almost like personalized editing," he said. "If you don't want to record a full lecture or class but you want to get high points, you pop it in and pop it out. You don't have to worry about editing later, putting up that content, and taking up all the space it's taking."
The IT Perspective
That speedy route to deployment is also reducing resistance on another front: the IT organization. IT has traditionally needed to be on board with lecture capture, since the solutions have tended to involve a lot of technology--microphones, video cameras, new software, support for servers to feed delivery of the video. But that's rapidly changing, Greenberg pointed out, as new lecture capture products appear that are delivered strictly as software-as-a-service (SaaS). "The really cutting-edge universities or CIOs within higher education are looking harder and harder at SaaS, now that bandwidth issues have been resolved and WiFi has gotten much, much better."
Panopto's CourseCast and Tegrity Campus 2.0 are two offerings being delivered as Web-based services. Providing lecture capture in SaaS form doesn't simply remove the need for IT support; it can also bolster the user experience. For example, the Panopto system allows the student to record notes on the computer where he or she is viewing the lecture, and those notes will forever be synched up with that portion of the lecture.
Some universities are forcing the issue of adoption. As an experiment, Abilene Christian University handed out an iPhone or iPod Touch to each incoming freshman in the 2008-2009 school year. Currently, faculty members use the device primarily as a response mechanism for conducting quizzes during class. But the university is providing faculty training on podcasting and vodcasting with an eye to the future, where lecture capture--among other practices--could become part of the learning experience.
Greenberg said he believes more institutions will follow Abilene Christian's lead. "We're definitely going to start seeing more initiatives either [using] netbooks or smartphones," he said. "And you'll see vendors spending more time optimizing the ability to deliver content to smaller screens."
Lecture capture "is rapidly becoming a need-to-have," concluded Greenberg, because "it helps education. People are going to start getting the sense that this is really helping our learners."
Lecture Capture Vendors
Accordent
Camtasia
Cisco Systems Digital Media Center
Echo360
HaiVision Systems
MediaPOINTE
Panopto Coursecast
Polycom
Sonic Foundry Mediasite
Tandberg
Tegrity
VBrick Systems
Video Furnace
Visionary Solutions
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