Listening only to a lecture’s audio denies the audience the visual cues and presentation elements that make classroom learning unique. Even when video is used it is a challenge to monitor both presenter and presentation content at the same time.  In order to maintain the integrity of a lecture all of its parts must be captured and replayed, including audio, video, screen content, and examples. To accomplish this a technological solution must be deployed, and in academia this solution is known as course capture, explored this week at TwTT by Academic Technologists Jeffrey Carlson, Matthew Regan, and Paul Perry.

Course capture has become an increasingly important academic technology, and its manifold applications include distance learning, a tool for study and review, and a means of archiving classroom content. Instructors report that students who have seen a presentation a second time frequently ask better questions and show improved understanding. Course capture also eliminates the need to spend time reviewing concepts for students who missed a session.

The advantages of course capture have made it a sought-after technology in higher education, with a recent study at Northwestern University finding that 79% of 150 universities surveyed use some type of course capture system. Yale is no exception, and both Yale College and the professional schools have experimented with various capture solutions, from the video-only Open Yale Courses to projects based on Adobe Connect to the Mediasite and Podcast Producer packages discussed here. Despite initial faculty resistance, both the current Mediasite pilot program and the established Podcast Producer system have yielded very favorable responses from both students and faculty.

Before discussing how systems were received by students and faculty, the technology itself must be described. In general there are two approaches to course capture – hardware and software. Software solutions can have lower initial costs and have the advantage of being usable from any location – a course could theoretically be recorded from the professor’s home. Despite this, the need to offer support services for every presenting computer, as well as the need to train end users, can increase the difficulty of deploying software based course capture. Hardware solutions, while requiring a user to be in the presence of either a fixed or portable recording appliance, can be almost transparent and require almost no user training – scheduling within the capture system can be used to automatically start and stop a recording, making the presenter’s sole responsibility to remember to clip on the lapel microphone. While each approach has advantages, and both have been explored and tested by Yale Academic Technologies, the more favored method tends to the be simpler, automated system.

On central campus, Academic Technologies opted for a off-site server solution as opposed to a homegrown one. The product would also ideally be transparent to end users and require minimal support for the instructors. These criteria led to the choice of Mediasite, a hardware based system that includes hosting and playback services that can be integrated with the Classes*v2 learning management system through a secure link. A different company, 3Play Media, provides closed captioning services, not only making the captured lectures accessible to hearing impaired students, but also making them searchable. The output is a dual window featuring the video and audio feed of the presenter in one, and the contents of the projected screen in the other.

The course capture system adopted at Yale School of Medicine was grown over a longer period of time and relies on software and onsite hosting. Podcast Capture is the recording package, which is pre-installed on Apple, classroom computers running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or newer, and works in conjunction with the Podcast Producer software included with Mac OS X Server 10.5 or 10.6. Scripts were created on the Podcast Producer server to automate the production process and include standardized templates, overlays and credits for consistency. Since a large majority of students use Apple hardware, this software solution was particularly well suited to needs of the YSM.

Conveniently, technical support staff for the recorded sessions are the same students enrolled in the courses. The students are trained at the beginning of the academic year to start and monitor the captures during class and keep the system running. If an issue should occur where a student needs additional support, Paul has the option of connecting remotely to any of the classroom computers for troubleshooting.

Captures are made available immediately once the rendering process is complete on the server. Courses from the present and last year are available to students directly online, and previous years are archived making for a remarkably efficient system. Over 600 lectures are stored using only 1.5 TB of space, and only 5 trouble incidents were reported in the past year. What’s more, all recordings are recoverable using recovery techniques and QuickTime as a backup.

Both systems have been welcomed, particularly by students. Paul mentions that whenever there is a problem with a lecture upload he is contacted immediately, demonstrating that students are actively using the resource. Among undergraduates the Mediasite based system is also heavily used. For Prof. John Faragher who recorded his American West course lectures last spring and only made the captures available to his 76 students a week before the final exam, metrics show 162 views totaling 75 hours. In another case, student presentations were recorded, making feedback more meaningful and helping students to judge their own stage presence.

Highly transparent capture systems seem to be forgotten by many faculty after a brief acclimation period. Professors who choose to use the system more actively can employ granular controls on what they want shared and when. In some cases, professors will choose to release materials only before an exam in order to discourage absenteeism while preserving the value of the captured lecture as a study tool. Mediasite also allows the production of an HTML document that contains an archive of captured courses which may be useful in preparing future presentations.

Course capture has clear benefits, and will certainly continue to be used at Yale. What is less certain is how the technology will be implemented in the future. Open source solutions like Opencast Matterhorn promise to add collaborative elements to a platform approach to course capture. Future implementations will probably also include a mix of hardware and software solutions in order to employ course capture in more diverse class offerings. Remote management is a feature of the two systems discussed here, and will be important in future implementations. With so many benefits, course capture is here to stay, now the only uncertainty is how it will be used.

A brief portion of Prof. John Faragher’s Mediasite course capture from last spring of can be seen below (Microsoft Silverlight player required). Click the the play button to begin the presentation. Use the “Enter Full Screen” button in the upper right-hand corner to expand the presentation as well as other controls on the right-hand side to customize the view. Closed captioning can be enabled by clicking the “CC” button at the bottom of the player.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below
(note a slight delay upon initial playback):