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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
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.
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.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
lecture style teaching sucks. I get just as much or more from a recording (especially if well done and well produced) as from a live, non-interactive, lecture.
An interactive teaching style (e.g. Socratic) is a different beast.
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.
Vastly under-rated, more insightful than it sounds.
You could set up your own video server and use VLC to deal with the streaming or whatever, but frankly YouTube is the way to go. Zero fees for your bandwidth (hell, they PAY you if you're popular enough!), and there's enough "YouTube Ready!" basic camcorders which come with very basic but easy to use software that you can get very close to "start, stop, upload". Frankly, if somebody isn't able to take a single video file and upload it to YouTube then they shouldn't be lecturing on anything, to anyone.
There's a multi-billion dollar infrastructure there for free. Use it!
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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