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 ....

YouTube lectures

Did you see this article about a UNSW academic using YouTube as his content provider?
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/03/04/1235842462189.html



Pity it doesn't really share what the students think of it - but it does emphasize the benefit of creating short pieces of content for the teachers - its re-usability - in this case, for high school students.

I remember a few years ago the sound of dropping jaws world wide when MIT announced that it was going to put all of its content freely available online - as it was the not the content that was the mark of the MIT experience, it was the learning activities that really made the difference. It is what the student does that is important.

Besides YouTube, iTunesU also provides good systems for distributing and organising content (audio and video) - see promotional video here. We need to factor this mobile dimension of learning into our thinking about delivery options.