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Best Software For Putting Lectures Online?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm trying to help a school put their classes online in the way most minimally invasive to the teachers. A few environmental considerations: They don't always have live internet in the classroom, or I'd just run to Skype. I'm hoping to make it as much one-touch start/stop as possible to start recording, stop recording, and upload to a server. I'd like to believe others here have already done something similar, so if a package or process worked for you, that would be great to hear. Not sure what if it's all PowerPoint lectures, or if they actually use a whiteboard, and if so what the best camera would be to use (on a school budget!)."
fits all the bills you mention
YouTube? It was good enough for Randy Pausch
... Windows Movie Maker!
Uh, Ever heard of youtube?
What's wrong with youtube?
Just make sure the camera is pointed at where the slides/whiteboard will show up, and is in good focus. Basically like the viewer is sitting in one of the desks.
If you're looking for something that won't have a direct cost to the school district to implement, take a look at Matterhorn ( http://opencast.org/matterhorn/ ). Camtasia Relay by Techsmith is also a product built for this purpose.
The Open University uses something called 'Elluminate' it's fairly low badwidth though and fairly sure it needs an internet connection. You could always go proper oldskool and knock up a few multimedia CD-ROMs using Dreamweaver or whatever.
If you're just going to be speaking then a movie is fine but some of the other options would enable them not to have their face plastered all over it if they preferred.
Seriously, it is older and not supported anymore, but still works on modern OSes fine. Has a screen capture mode that works great. You start it and it just captures what happens on the screen until you hit stop. Very easy to use. Additionally, it has a codec called Windows Media Screen which uses compression well suited to static computer images. You can get a whole hour long lecture in like 30MB if space is a concern.
You just have the instructor wear a mic that feeds in to the computer's input (if the room has sound reinforcement just split off a feed from that) and students get all their slides and what they were saying while they did it. Means they can run programs too and demo that.
For easiest results, record in regular Windows Media format, which takes up way more space, but you can upload that right to Youtube. If you let them know what you are doing they'll let you have longer videos.
In terms of recording whiteboards and so on, I don't know of anything both easy and cheap. An AVCHD cam does a great job, but you usually need to spend a little time in a video editor afterwards. There are some high end capture solutions, but as the term "high end" implies, you don't really want to know what they cost.
Oh please.
Maybe you can use Adobe Captivate,
Its easy use, can be flexible solution for your aim
As a starting point, make the actual videos downloadable or on DVD with a "quiz" style menu.
Check out the Stanford On-line courses. http://www.db-class.org/course/auth/welcome That's probably about the style you're looking for.
Course Lectures split in to blocks of 10-15 mins each, with a small True/False or Multi-Choice quiz at the end. (you can do this with DVD's it just takes a bit of planning with the menus when authoring the DVD.)
All supported by PDF of Teacher & Student lecture notes and examples on a single DVD.
Simples....
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
What are you talking about? Today, the poorest person in the US has access to more material than most rich people has access to 50 years ago. The explosion of information available through books, video, the internet is just amazing. I just got done with the Stanford AI course and am grateful for the opportunity to learn from some of the smartest minds in the field. But with your attitude, that was just a waste of resources.
Yes, there will always be a need for human interaction for learning... but that does not mean it is the only means of learning.
Putting classes online doesn't necessarily mean that the class is held online. I would have loved it if all of my classes had been archived online. It would free me to concentrate on what the professor was staying instead of concentrating on writing down notes as fast as possible. I could also go back to the lectures at a later time while studying for a test or even after I've finished the class and want to review a concept that is built upon in a class that follows.
Surveilance monitoring software could work well for that, easy to start/stop recording, easy to remote access recorded videos...
I just now mentioned in another post that I once had a teacher who supplemented his regular lectures with a single weekly online lecture where he worked out homework problems for anyone who was having difficulty with the homework. (it was a type of calculus-based physics, so the answer wasn't always immediately obvious) I surely wouldn't want to convert all the lectures to an online-only format, but it was very nice having the option to "attend" the online instructor-led homework-help lecture if I had questions about any of the homework problems. If you had already finished the homework and didn't have any difficulty completing it, you didn't feel obligated to attend since it was an optional online session. Also, he archived the lecture so that, afterwards, we could go back and re-watch anything if we needed to.
Of course you could always send him an email, attend his office hours, or ask him in class, but it was still a nice alternative.
For a more general purpose online learning platform Moodle is certainly worth looking into. I haven't used it in anger for a few years now but it appears to be active.
moodle derp
Great post, I conceive website owners should larn a lot from this website its very user pleasant. Ultrabook Notebook Tipis Harga Murah Terbaik
These are nontrivial considerations, and often overlooked. I've been recording my calculus lectures at my university (Stony Brook), which has Echo360. Unfortunately, our setup is (a) expensive, and (b) useless for my discipline (mathematics), because it cannot capture 16 feet of blackboard in a way that can be read later, especially if you also sometimes use a data projector (which I do). It works fine for power-point oriented lectures, but you can't do mathematics properly via power point, because students need to see the problems being worked, and need to refer to the beginning of the problem (so it doesn't fit on a single slide).
What has worked for me is to set up a pair of HD cameras in the back of the room, pointed so each can see (part of) the blackboard. Then I post-process this into a single video stream later. If I am using a data projector, I also grab the stream from Echo360. (I've also made multiple synchronized streams on a web-page using JWplayer, but this doesn't work as well)
Unfortunately, this is not a turn-key solution.
Something like matterhorn might be helpful too, but you really need consider all of the content needs before deciding on a delivery mechanism.
"I'm trying to help a school put their classes online in the way most minimally invasive to the teachers." That guarantees a worthless product.
Recorded lectures aren't that great to begin with. On top of that, most of the useful content is on the board or the slides, so you want a format which emphasizes them, not the speaker. A fixed wide-angle shot of the front of the room is almost useless.
One little trick Stanford used for years was having presenters write on a paper pad, which was picked up by an overhead camera and projected to the students as well as being recorded. The pad was only 5" x 7", so that the instructor couldn't overfill a single page with more text than would survive mediocre analog TV.
Right! Next you know people will want to write things down in order to pass information around. That would be horrible! ;-)
As having access to more material but when HR and others passover people who use the new stuff and go with people who use traditional college system.
Tech and voc schools still don't get the respect they should get.
Now this at worst may drop your school down to the University of Phoenix level.
I use some syncing software by these guys at Singular software. They have something called Presto that is a 1 touch solution for creating easy to watch lectures. It assumes these lectures have slides or a powerpoint and you plug those files in and it lays them over the video of the projection to get a cleaner picture.
It also tracks the face and does other cool stuff
http://www.singularsoftware.com/presto.html
I'm waiting for it to come out for the PC
Cheers
Rob
Phasefirefilms
At Michigan State University, we have a Techsmith Relay server. The instructor just puts in the USB thumb drive, the auto-run runs, and they just have to type in their lecture's name and hit "Start". It is recorded to the USB or automatically uploaded to our capturing server if they are on the network. It can automatically be pushed out to our LMS (Angel / Moodle), or posted on a webpage for people to access. Works on both Win and Mac, and doesn't need anything installed, which is super-nice.
I've recorded a LOT of sessions with Camtasia as well. Great product, with tons of bells and whistles, but it does require the user to do the work of editing and encoding. That's great for me (I can edit it before I post), but not great for people who just want it to get out of their way.
http://www.techsmith.com/
This is exactly the design scenario for Podcast Publisher and Podcast Library.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/server/features/all.html#podcasting
While it can take advantage of a whole cluster of servers, it can also run (albeit more slowly) on a single Core i7 Mini Server. For more detailed docs, see:
https://help.apple.com/advancedserveradmin/mac/10.7/#apdEDF248EC-ED8E-473E-8166-E7D0B2A854D7
It's in use at lots of universities and some K-12 schools.
Hope this helps.
--Paul
I haven't used ether of these, but Stanford has most of their openflow system opensourced it appears:
http://med.stanford.edu/irt/edtech/projects/mediaflow/
Or take a look at OpenCast's Matterhorn Project: http://opencast.org/matterhorn/
nuff said.
When I've felt the need to provide audio recordings of my lectures, I simply record them with a pocket voice recorder that records directly to mp3 and mounts as a usb drive. My recorder is a Sony, but there are many on the market that are as good or better. From there it's easy to post them on Blackboard, Moodle, WebCT, or whatever courseware the teachers are using. When we do video, that's generally more of a production involving IT people and a different hosting server, but for audio a very simple approach seems to be the best.
Have you looked at adding courses via iTunes University? It's pretty easy to get up and running, and a lot of universities use it for internal (private) courses.
curious: did you lear how to spell by yourself? or pehaps your writing is from an online leraing system?
What human interaction? Human interaction has been dead in school for decades now, can't have it when the state gives you a lesson plan and expect you to not deviate when teaching forty students in a classroom.
Having someone monologue for 45 minutes in person or via video is the exact same thing. Except the video may have someone whose actually a half decent public speaker.
Then the teacher may actually have time to answer student questions instead of spending all his/her time monologing.
Then the lecture was too fast.
I know the problem, here they are also too fast. But being able to review the lecture video would raise expectations by the prof "you can always rewatch later" and make the lecture even faster still.
at least firefox sell check gets learn right. Does IE even have a sell check?
For a good student, video is a supplement to lecture, not a replacement for it. Instead of spending the entire class trying to write everything down that the professor says, the good student can sit back and think about what is being said, formulate qiestions on the spot, make notes about their reactions, and then go back after the class and fill in the details from the video. Video lectures are a lot like textbooks in this regard.
And if you ask "Why should anyone come to class if they can just watch the video?" Well, it's up to the professor to provide added benefit, by making the class interactive: lots of time for questions, group exercises, etc.
If you do plan on going the camera route, you may want to take a look at www.cowboyfrank.net and look through his camera reviews. Based on his info, I went and got the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000. [Part No. 960-000048] Google the Part number if you are serious about getting one or more of them. The price is pretty good for them right now (under $50 with an average price of $75).
It was what the uni I went to used (albeit bastardised beyond recognition), the uni here uses it and best of all, it's free. On top of this, my mum does some lecturing and has learned how to use it without a problem, despite quite possibly being one of the most tech illiterate people on the planet.
Also consider what to do for classes that do not use lecture much if at all. Many modern science classrooms use other methods, such as Modeling Physics. If you were to video my classroom, you would need to be prepared to video student whiteboard sessions, lab demonstrations and discussion sessions, experimental design, experiments, data analysis, lab whiteboard discussions, and extensions such as worksheets, challenge problems, computer simulations and programming.
I think you would need a live videographer to properly record something like my class in any sort of useful way.
Please, please don't use Windows only formats. Lots of students have macs, and iPhones, and iPads, and AndroidPhones.
Going Windows only may be fine in a corporate setting, but not for students in a school setting.
I know what you're saying, but after a long time of both being a student and a teacher, I think there's a lot of value in actually taking notes, even if you never look at the ever again. In particular, I've consistently seen that students who record lectures perform more poorly than those taking notes. It's the whole Montessori thing -- the more senses that you can engage, the more likely you are to retain what you're being presented.
I've worked with schools for years, and can point out some things that may help. First, if the school is in a poorer area, check out your E-Rate eligibility. In some cases, you can pay 10 cents on the dollar for technology. Among the eligible technology would be video streaming, such as vbrick.
The vbrick units are highly scriptable, and you can ( and I have ) programmed them to do as follows:
- user hits the button, as in a physical button on their desk or the wall or whatever
- system records for x minutes
- system uploads video to VOD server
- VOD publishes video to public web server
Yes, you can even have an "on-air" light turn on when the system is recording.
Later on, you can add tags or other information on which people can search your content. You can attach documents, or links to other web-based content. So your video of a lesson has the associated homework, plus link to your states' DOE standards web site or whatever else you want. It can be integrated with moodle or similar systems. You can limit access to video by username/password and/or by IP address. If you want, videos recorded in the high school can be limited to specific users and/or IPs, so lets say the 2nd graders can't watch the sex-ed class. Likewise, you can limit videos on the public internet to your low bit-rate content only.
The critical part here is ease of use. Teachers are asked to do more and more with no new resources. If your solution consists of login to this, click that, then this, etc.... it simply won't get used except maybe by a couple tech-savvy teachers. Of course when those people leave or change positions, your project dies. Then your well intentioned project becomes just another expensive boondoggle. In some ways, spending MORE on a project will guarantee success. Administration may let a 10K project disappear, but probably not a 100K project.
Teachers are given the curriculum, not the lesson plans. Teachers wouldn't be complaining so much about the pay if they weren't being expected to do the lesson planning on their own time.
As for the lecturing, just because there's a class of 40 students doesn't mean that there's no room for individual attention, it just means that it's less frequent and much shorter. If you're lecturing for more than 10 minutes without any student interaction you're doing it wrong.
when I took notes, I felt I was more focused since I had to be in order to take notes.
laptop friendly professors helped - my handwriting usually isn't the greatest, but it gets even worse when I'm trying to write at lecture speed.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
http://www.panopto.com/ we use this at our institution, if you use an LMS like moodle it can integrate as well.
On human interaction in teaching (physics in college in fact), check out this 2.5 minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBYrKPoVFwg . A great study on how this leads to more learning than lecturing is this article from the journal Science: "Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/index.html . Briefly, they compared 2 novice physics instructors who were trained in cognitive science (and thus how people learn) and who taught with a variety of non-lecture methods to an experienced, well-regarded lecturer. The students of the novice instructors had two standard deviations more learning. Note that the third author is a Nobel Laureate, U.S. Professor of the Year (given for teaching), and currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President for science education. For more on these methods, see "Don't Lecture Me," http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/ . This work deserves to be more widely known.
I almost never take notes unless the professor has designed his/her lecture to be note taking friendly. The reason I do not take notes is I have to concentrate on the writing/typing more than what the professor is teaching. I found that being engaged in the lecture is a better solution (for me). If the lectures were archived on line, I might be more apt to take notes because then I could go back and review my notes against what the professor taught in the lecture.
http://www.epiphan.com/products/recording/lecture-recorder/
Disclaimer:
I work for this company.
HTML is the way to go for the web. It allows hyperlinks and such fancy stuff.
Depending on the lecturers I actually found many to talk too slowly, be boring, go off on wild tangents and otherwise fail to engage my interest for 2 hours at a time.
In those classes I opted to not go and download the video after. The video I could skip through or in some cases play back at double speed. It worked really well and saved time in some classes which I considered to be a waste of time but none the less had to "attend" due to the lecturer every so often imparting some knowledge or working through some useful example that wasn't in the textbooks.
Instead of saying "Oh please", why not provide elaborated rationale?
These things could happen, but there is no reason a priori to assume that they will.
I've found the online lectures dealing with multivariable calculus at both Berkeley and MIT extremely useful. It has allowed me to skip to specific sections, compare and contrast the salient points, and tie these into use of au xiliary texts with useful (to me at least) results, as well as search on line for Mathematica based code that implements the specific techniques.
Are there any open source alternatives to the Tegrity software? Looks nice, but cost is always a consideration.
We use Echo360
I have a Ph.D. But I started working a few years ago on an area that I never had any formal education (IT), and most likely do more money than what I would do with my diploma, so I would guess that traditional education is by no means something we should be caring too much, Im sure my case is not the most common, but surely here in .mx there are a lot of graduate people working on a completly different area.
My 2 cents, Im not the AC you replied to
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
You did it the wrong way, I used to get all my attention to the teachers and if needed copy someone else's notes or even better read from the source books the teacher used for the lecture
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
my school uses camtasia paired and adobe connect as a backup source.
There are some great hardware products that do lecture capture, like the encoders from NCast.
Does IE even have a sell check?
Does Windows Genuine Advantage count as a "sell check" to make sure Microsoft sold the user a copy of Windows?
My friend is a senior sysadmin at a University and doesn't have a degree.
Yeah, tech school isn't as good when it comes to breaking into your first technical job. But assuming you have over 2 years of experience, it is really a minor point.
University of Phoenix is a real University, it is well above vocational schools.
Stanford has a huge amount of material online for free on itunes that is mostly in the form of recording a normal class. There is a full year of iPhone type stuff, lots of other computer topics, physics, etc.
I always here this stuff about class sizes, but it brings me back to grade school... the school I went to had the largest class sizes in the district, and the highest test scores. I'd want more teachers to students than we had, but it is hardly the most important thing. I'd rate quality of information much higher, and having teachers smart enough to understand the material at a more advanced level than they are teaching.
University of Phoenix is a real University, it is well above vocational schools.
They're regionally accredited (North Central), which is far better than many vocational/trade schools. (You'll find that many small tech schools only maintain state approval.)
While I don't know if their reputation is undeserved, they did suffer from quite a bit of unwarranted criticism just for being one of the first online-only correspondence schools. Needless to say, distance education has come a long way since then, at least as far as public opinion is concerned. Today, many traditional institutions offer a wide variety of distance-only degree programs.
Reputation aside, there are many other reasons to avoid University of Phoenix, the most obvious being their outrageous tuition which is higher than many traditional private colleges and universities.
Required reading for internet skeptics
You absolutely need to check out the Khan Academy. Besides a very comprehensive grade school curriculum, the site has tools to support a teacher in finding out what students know and where they are having difficulty, so they can concentrate on helping a student where they need it most. As well, the Khan Academy has opened up public tutoring to give students the special support they need from people who've volunteered to teach. This is an amazing site and an incredible resource.
Unless the lecturers are willing to change their style quite a bit I don't think you'll do well without a cameraman in the room.
In my experience lecturers move around quite a lot, and sometimes you need to pull back to get their body language, at other times you need to zoom
in on the black- or white-board to see what they are writing or pointing at.
Just make sure that it doesn't affect the lectures themselves. Normally, large portions of lectures are interactive. If the teachers know they're being recorded, and that the people watching can't interact, they're that much more likely to drop the interactive portion of their lessons.
I'm a Stanford student--a real, live, physical one that sits in classrooms--who has to absorb information from a stream of slides and speech, and I feel much worse off having had all of my lectures recorded.
So I guess my suggestion is, sure, have a recorded session. Just don't make the students who are in the classroom suffer by recording *their* session. Is it more work for the lecturers? Yes. Either hire more lecturers, or don't do this; trying to teach more students with the same number of teachers makes the quality of the education go down. It's a simple idea, but a lot of people don't realize it just the same.
>>I have a Ph.D.
Let me guess - it wasn't in English right?
University of Phoenix isn't online-only, although the correspondence parts are. They have campuses all over the place, presumably they have a lot of people taking the classes they have a harder time with at a campus, and the subjects they're more comfortable with online.
I can't really think even a single reason why correspondence over snail mail would be more trustworthy, or better in any way.
Yeah. provide rationale to refute troll post. LOL.
Putting "afterthought" classroom material online is a waste of storage and bandwidth. With legal requirements to make things accessible, and given the cost to deliver this content - at least find faculty who have engaging content that's been optimized for online delivery. One instructor's crappy PPT lecture on articulations is no better than the hundreds already out there.
I had a math teacher that did this. He had a netbook running Fedora and would use it to record audio and the overhead screen during classes. Since most of what he wrote up there were proofs, it helped a great deal. Last I heard, he and some other people (he's more of a CS guy than anything), were working on some software to stream the classes while in progress, as well as allow interaction from students not physically present.
By far the easiest solution I've seen is the Crestron Capture HD (link below). It is a dedicated hardware solution that will capture directly to a USB memory stick if you don't have a network connection. If you do have a network connection it will automagically upload the video to the server of your choice. The server software (soon to come) made by Crestron will automatically (re)encode it in your chosen format and publish it. All you need to do it hit the record button once its setup. Plus, it integrates nicely with classrooms installed with Crestron controls already.
Crestron Capture HD
We use it for universities, and it is open source. Online classes, homework, colaberation, etc.
You can import a Powerpoint or a PDF (there are more formats as well) and present on an iPad - everything you do gets recorded - then you can export to MP4 or YouTube. Obviously, you need to convince the lecturer to use it ;-)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/explain-everything/id431493086?ls=1&mt=8
There are highlighters, a laser pointer - you can also save the whole lecture as a PDF (more or less - it takes screenshots of your slides).
Professionally-looking lecture videos are never raw recordings. One has to cut out unneeded pauses, stupid phrases, and switch between the blackboard and the presentation as needed. That's a job for a video editing specialist - so hire one and give him both a full HD recording of the blackboard (so that it can be cropped as needed and panned post-factum, yielding SD video that contains only what's relevant) and the screencast.
..or who owns the IP rights over this lecture? If the school has a copy of your lecture and its COMPLETE, there might be a temptation in times of budgetary pressure to cut the staff count, but hey, the lectures are preserved so the students won't miss out.. You probably won't be responsible for the original research content of the lecture but you did assemble it into a lecture. Is it a performance?
I'm a student that does what would commonly be seen as something similar to "correspondence" during the schooling term. At my school, we use a program called "elluminate live." It's Java-based and somewhat cross-platform (I use Ubuntu and it works fairly well). It's relatively simple to use, however it does require some infrastructure if you want to use it independently - databases, html frontends, etc. The program also has the ability to record online lectures which are then accessible via the html "session manager." It's worth mentioning, the main media for teaching with elluminate are a virtual whiteboard, VOIP, text chat and screen sharing. In the years we've been using this system, we have all found the camera function somewhat meaningless, it's much better to see text and diagrams on the whiteboard.
That's because a lot of people go to the "traditional college system". They don't necessarily learn more, but they have been preselected and they have made a huge financial commitment, both of which makes them "better" employees in some sense.
The root cause of that is the drive to push more and more people into college even though they won't need it for their professions, and to finance this insanity with loans.
Run a trial with Elluminate for settling on it.
I've hosted 40+ seat education sessions with it, and found the recording would not engage.
Called CaptureLive HD. It is a combination of room hardware and server software.
http://www.crestron.com/resources/product_and_programming_resources/catalogs_and_brochures/online_catalog/default.asp?cat=1058&subcat=1505&id=2321
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
I've been using Camtasia for years when teaching at JHU. I use a graphics tablet (Wacom Bamboo Fun medium) and Evernote as my whiteboard so everything I write is captured. I have a headset mic on to capture what I say. I also write sample code during the class (using Eclipse) and when teaching Android, either use an emulator or mirror a real phone using droid@screen. I post the videos as mp4s on our courseware system, and the students love it!
The only thing they miss is my dashing good looks...
Definitely agree with Jjeff1's suggestion about E-Rate. You may also be eligible for Title I funds depending on your school's situation. I know in the district where I work, some of the "poorest" schools are the most technologically advanced, all thanks to Title I funding. Have you considered getting some students involved? You might be surprised how many would be willing to help out with some of the labor for the less-turnkey solutions (let them handle editing, annotating, uploading, etc.). I know I would have jumped at the chance as a student, especially if I got credit for it.