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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!)."
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.
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 I would have loved it if all of my classes had been archived online.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
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/
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.