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.

Capturing lectures

When developing content for teaching in online courses, or providing extended flexibility for face-to-face or external students, many people consider the use of lecture capture techniques. Lecture capture could be as simple as making an audio recording of a lecture and slides/notes available online or can involve using sophistocated software programs that link together the voice, visuals and resources.

Educause put together a short document called the 7 things you should know about Lecture capture that describes what it is and considers the significance, implications and downsides.

One of our first podcasters at UniSA was Tim Sawyer in Medical Radiation - he prepared this short presentation about his approach to share with others in 2007 (6 minutes) as he was quite impressed with how much his students engaged with the recordings.

Currently we don't have any automated systems to do podcasting or lecture capture at UniSA - although last year we were close to getting Lectopia - an automated record and publish tool installed in lecture theatres - but for some reason it all faded away. If you want to make recordings you need to have access to your own (school's) recorder.

If you do want to try making audio recordings, Online advisers will set up "podcasting" environments for courses that students can subscribe to to receive lecture recordings to their ipod as soon as they are available. A manual upload of audio files and pdf documents (lecture notes) by the lecturer is required.

Our next blog post will be from Peter Hamilton from DASI who has used Adobe Presenter as his main lecture capture tool for courses in the Associate Degree in Engineering (Defence Systems).

Stay tuned ....

Community aims

Welcome to our new group - Engaging Online Learning. 

This group has come into being at the request of Brenton Dansie (negotiated project with the Learning and Teaching Unit and ITEE 2009)  to address a disconnection between the online teachers in the Division. He knows that there is online teaching and learning out there, but the teachers and their experiences are not brought together in any organised way.  Would you agree with this perception?

The Dean would then look to us, as a group, to support with development activities, presenters, new PLE trials, apply for grants and awards - and could help shape a strategy for online teaching and learning for the Division in the future. 

To meet this we will start a blog-based Community of Practice (CoP) - this sketch from Nina Evan's whiteboard tells the story...

Therefore we have a few aims...

Primarily we are a Community of practice (CoP) that shares our experiences (good and bad) as teachers in the online environment based in the Division of ITEE. Using blog posts and tagging we will publish our practice and allow the community to interact with these experiences through comments. This will be used as an record of what is happening in the Division for reference for Brenton and newcomers to online teaching and learning.

We are able to apply to Brenton for funding for things like trials, seminar presenters etc. to have some fresh influence to the group.

We are also in a position to influence what is happening in the online teaching and learning arena in the Division by shaping our strategy - but this is secondary and long term aim. 

So welcome, please subscribe and stay connected!

Diana and Nina

P.S. To "subscribe" - add your email to the box in the right hand column called "Subscribe via Email" to get an email alert or use one of the RSS feed options to your browser, outlook or news reader. There is a second step - validation of your request by clicking on a link in an email, however this email often ends up in Junk mail folders!