Putting Defence lecture material on-line

Peter Hamilton (Defence and Systems Institute) writes about his approach to e-learning by using online presentations to replace the lectures.

I had the job of creating an Associate degree in Engineering (Defence Systems) program where all students would be working in industry and needed flexibility for learning. The students were more mature and had worked in manufacturing engineering roles, primarily as technical officers, and needed to retrain for work in companies that service the growing Defence industry.

Below is a presentation that describes the project (UniSA staff can view the web sites linked within the presentation).

Associate Degree in Engineering (Defence Systems) e-learning project

One of the strategies used was a 'lecture capture' technique where we made short recordings of the topics given by our course experts that could be accessed online 24x7. We had financial support from the federal government to implement the program and create the resources.

To make this happen, I purchased 6 licenses for Adobe Presenter 7, the application software underlying the ‘In a Nutshells’, in about Sep/Oct 2008. It works as a PowerPoint add-in that publishes that allows ‘narrated PowerPoint presentations’ to be created and saved on a special server in ISTS. The process of up-loading narrated presentations to the Server is centrally controlled by me.

The tool is relatively easy to use with most lecturers being able to master the tool in under 30 minutes. Narrated presentations have been created in a number of ways depending on the preferences of the lecturer:

1. Lecturers use an existing PowerPoint presentation for which they have prepared a script or, sometimes, good notes. Lecturers then record the script using the Presenter 7 tool. The script becomes the ‘Notes’ component of the narrated presentation.


2. Lecturers use an existing PowerPoint presentation but without a script. Using the Presenter 7 tool they record the narration for each slide speaking ‘off-the-cuff’, prompted by the slide content. The sound file is then transcribed into a Word document by a professional transcriber; is edited by the lecturer to eliminate ums and arghs; and forms the ‘Notes’ component of the narrated presentation.


3. Lecturers present a PowerPoint based lecture in the normal face-to-face fashion. The lecture is recorded using a digital recorder. The sound files are transcribed in the same way as above. Using Presenter 7, the sound files are uploaded to match the PowerPoint slides while the transcribed and edited sound file is used as the ‘Notes’ component of the narrated presentation. This is a quite labour intensive process.

These recordings have been well received by students both on-line and on-campus as they can revisit them as often as they like. We have sometimes just played them as a lecture and still the students appreciated them as they were very clear.

We need to be mindful of the length of the recordings as there is only a certain amount of time that someone will look at their screen to watch a recording. Our average lecture length is about 20-30 minutes, some a little longer, others a little shorter. For a lecture, I consider about 30 minutes to be optimal.