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!)."

Comments

Matterhorn or Camtasia Relay

[grommit]

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.

Re:Youtube.

[Trepidity]

If you "verify" your YouTube account with a mobile phone, they remove the length limits (which are otherwise 15 mins), though there's still some sort of (quite high) filesize limit. That's why it's possible for there to be things like 100 hours of Nyan Cat.

Define your needs first

[ttocs_47]

It is important to consider what you want in these online classes.

• 1) Are you looking to make a course accessible after the fact, or do you want to do distance learning (which is what it sounds like when you say "I'd just run Skype") where interaction is possible?
• 2) What types of courses are you making available? For example, some courses only need to a single camera on the teacher, other courses will need both teacher and/or power-point simultaneously, yet others will need video, chalkboard or whiteboard, and teacher, and others will also need the audience. Note also that some disciplines (math especially) use a lot of chalkboard, so you may need multiple cameras.

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.