A look at current lecture capture usage in higher education — and how to use it more efficiently.

LECTURE CAPTURE SURVEY RESULTS

Students and faculty live and work in an environment with instant access to all varieties of media. As part of this evolving culture, many students are requesting recorded lecture material outside of their regularly scheduled classroom hours.

A recent survey found that 80 percent of campuses use lecture capture systems.

The goal of most educators is to implement a cost-effective and scalable solution. Achieving this goal requires an understanding of the demand, direction, and best practices of lecture capture services.

In early February 2009, a survey was conducted to various university lists and groups around the world. Most of the 150 responses came from institutions in the United States, but others were received from Australia, Canada, Chile, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

After reviewing the responses provided by our colleagues, we came to the following conclusions:

Although the data indicates implementation is widespread, few have done so beyond a small number of classrooms.

There appears to be a lack of standardization; no single method has shown itself to be more prevalent than another. There are no firmly established best practices for lecture content collection, manipulation, or delivery.

The central IT organization appears to be the group most often leading the implementation and management of these services, although almost a third of the respondents indicate lecture capture is initiated and managed by individual schools, departments, and, in some cases, individual faculty.

Almost half of the institutions surveyed share content via their course management system. Just over half make a portion of their captured content publicly available.

Just over half the respondents record video as part of the captured content. The other half focus on audio only, or audio and content.

Only a quarter of the respondents have an automated system for lecture capture recording. Most systems require some level of hands-on support.

Kathy Leoni is manager, Classroom Design Group and Steven Lichti is a systems engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

SEVEN THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT LECTURE CAPTURE SYSTEMS

WHAT IS IT?
Lecture capture systems allow instructors to record what happens in their classrooms and make it available digitally. The term refers to a wide array of software, system capabilities, and hardware options. In its simplest form, it might be an audio recording made with an iPod. Or, the term might refer to a software capture program, such as TechSmith’s Camtasia Relay, that records cursor movement, typing, and other on-screen activity for demonstration purposes with an audio voiceover.

At the other end of the complexity spectrum, a lecture capture system might mean a turnkey operation like Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite, which is a webcasting platform that is frequently set up in a dedicated studio where software and hardware reside permanently to provide as-needed audio and video recordings of presentations and accompanying slides or other digital resources. While not intended as a replacement for in-class instruction, lecture capture systems offer three important benefits: an alternative when students miss class; an opportunity for content review; and content for online course development.

WHO’S DOING IT?
Many schools are implementing these systems, and captured lectures often form part of online or blended course development. The University of Geneva, which captured video of lectures as far back as 1970, began a program two years ago to use a lecture capture system to convert its archived holdings to new formats and generate new recordings. Lecture capture systems are also popular in health and medicine programs. Michigan State University, The Johns Hopkins University, the University of North Carolina, and a number of other institutions with medical programs have been explorers in and adopters of this technology, possibly because medical training often involves demonstrations that cannot be easily repeated. In lecture capture sessions at Carleton University, students meet in classes where the lectures can be broadcast via internet television (ITV); lectures are recorded and made available within 24 hours. One team at Carleton has devised a video mashup tool that lets students personalize lecture capture by tagging, editing, annotating, and subsequently sharing the results with their peers.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
Lecture capture systems include a suite of software applications with specifications for preferred hardware, which typically consists of items such as a camera and a microphone that are available in many classrooms. The Panopto suite, for example, includes CourseCast Recorder, CourseCast Editor, and CourseCast Server. These applications integrate with audiovisual hardware to capture a lecture. Pushing a single button is enough to activate turnkey systems like Tegrity Campus and Panopto CourseCast and begin capturing a lecture. Recordings can be viewed on the web or in formats compatible with MP3 players and portable video devices.

WHY IS IT SIGNIFICANT?
Lecture capture enhances and extends existing instructional activities, whether in face-to-face, fully online, or blended learning environments. It works especially well in subject areas where students benefit from repeated viewing of content, as when complex information is discussed or formulas are written on a board. The video-on-demand portion of lecture capture allows students to closely examine the steps of a demonstrated procedure or stop and focus on important actions in a science experiment.

Lecture capture may enable freer thinking — students who find themselves struck by a particular comment or point can pursue that line of thought, confident that the lecture itself can be reviewed later. Some worry that students may cut classes in favor of viewing captured lectures. Yet, from the advent of the cassette tape through the podcast, students have found that recordings take as much time to absorb as a live lecture, but without the opportunities for question-and-answer or interaction with their classmates.

WHAT ARE THE DOWNSIDES?
Some question whether any pedagogical benefit emerges from replaying a lecture and covering the same ground twice. Beyond that, the practice raises a number of issues around who should have access to lectures and for how long, as well as questions of how the recordings are to be stored and what policies will govern their handling. A complicating element of lecture capture is ambiguity over who is responsible for providing the recording resources and who owns the intellectual property once the recording has been made. Using these systems for classes, conferences, and guest speakers might require a legal release, particularly when lecture capture depends on a complex infrastructure provided by the institution. Colleges and universities must also decide whether the same release applies when a professor independently captures a lecture and makes it available to students on a faculty website.

WHERE IS IT GOING?
Recorded lectures could easily result in large stores of material that require new paradigms for search and archiving, including the ability for students to create personal course archives. The platform may invite mashups as developers enable ways for students to annotate a lecture itself and share the results with study groups. Such additions to captured recordings could change the character of the lecture as students annotate and reorganize what they have heard. Institutions will need to establish copyright policies for captured lectures, arrange releases, and ensure that intellectual property rights are not left in limbo. Future lecturers might find that elements of course content become a point for contract negotiation under the heading of “courseware rights.”

WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING?
This technology adapts to multiple input locations so that instructors or guest speakers can present from any location that has the appropriate recording equipment. At the same time, it conforms easily to a variety of content delivery models — podcasts, mobile devices, laptops, or high-definition presentation. These systems provide convenience for students, offering remarkable flexibility with course timetables to coordinate work and study schedules. Students might even be able to take two courses scheduled at overlapping times. Emerging features in tagging and markup may draw students into intellectual discussion on a topic and encourage them to share work with others.

Lecture capture also offers new flexibility for each student’s course of study, as a single lecture could be extracted from a series and viewed separately by any student enrolled at the college or university, promoting ad hoc interdisciplinary research. Lecture capture provides new educational opportunities — for distributed learning students as well as residential students in face-to-face or blended courses — opening up multidisciplinary programs where students can pick the best lectures from any school on any topic and assemble their own lesson plans. Faculty, on the other hand, can work with colleagues on their own campus or disparate campuses to assemble multidisciplinary courses constructed with lectures from the leading experts in the field.

 Source: EDUCAUSE and The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, www.educause.edu