Archive for June, 2007

While this year’s NMC Conference has a substantial number of sessions focused on Second Life, it is certainly much more than “just” Second Life. Wednesday afternoon, I attended a “Podcast & Webcast – State of the Art” session offered by Victor Edmonds from UC Berkeley. The session was standing room only and offered a number of valuable lessons learned – from UCB and institutions represented in the audience.

I want to first summarize a few general themes discussed during the session, and then I have a thought I took away from the session.

• ADA & Accessibility. Berkeley works with Automatic Sync for closed captioning of webcasts; the closed captioning service is available to learners during the recording (if I heard correctly), and the cost is about the same as hiring a signer for the hearing impaired. Old Dominion (Steven Crawford) has used Dragon Naturally Speaking for initial transcript capture followed by manual editing and cleanup of transcripts. Stanford (reportedly) has hired students to transcript content with some success. University of Texas (Coco Kishi) suggested that closed captioning may not always be the better option; video capture of a signer may be better for some situations and learners. UCB only does closed captioning for courses being attended by a hearing impaired learner; other courses go to the web without closed captioning or transcripts. However, some states (12) reportedly require all content produced by state institutions to be ADA compliant; that number has increased each year over the past several years.
• What do learners use? An informal survey of students by UCB showed that learners use the archives of previous courses a great deal; UCB records each professor’s course each semester. That archive allows learners to review their professor’s lecture on the topic in advance of their class session on the topic or to review a different professor’s lecture on the same topic. UCB learned that live, real-time streams of lectures were not used a great deal; learners come back to the archives if they miss class, but they do not watch a live lecture in lieu of attending class. UCB has discontinued live streamed lectures. Also, MIT found in a study they conducted that learners use the audio/video content more than just audio; although, there wasn’t an explanation of the content of the video during this session (was it a screencast? or, video of the professor at the front of the room?) University of Pennsylania conducted a qualitative survey and found that most learners do not use iPods to access content; they use standard desktop/laptop machines.
• Recording Solutions. UCB has used a combination of Real Player and an internally developed scheduling application; they have been re-evaluating and considered vendors and internal solutions. UCB opted to do neither – instead waiting for Podcast Producer included in the next release of the Mac OS; Professor Edmonds believes Podcast Producer will have a tremendous impact on the pod/web-casting market.
• What about copyrighted content in presentations? UCB does several things to resolve issues with copyrighted content being used during a lecture (which would then be included in the webcast archives of the lecture). First, they control the type of recordings made available; if a professor uses a lot of copyrighted video, they’ll record audio only. Second, if they opt to record the same professor using audio and video, they make it available only via their LMS, not allowing it to be redistributed publicly. Third, they use a workflow that allows a “scrubbing unit” that edits out the copyrighted material before it’s made publicly available; surprisingly, this unit is only one person with part-time student assistants, and their time is not consumed entirely by scrubbing.
• Impact on Learner Outcomes? UCB is currently conducting assessment, but their work to this point has been largely qualitative focused on learner feedback. UCB and Paul Bergen at Harvard both indicated the most frequent feedback from learners focused on the flexibility the classroom recordings provide. Learners use the lectures and believe the flexibility and added study tool are important but don’t specifically suggest that they increased understanding of the course material.

The most important conclusion I drew from the session was that video recording of professors may not be worthwhile; the most optimal solution may be an enhanced podcast or screencast. Most of the institutions producing an extensive number of classroom recordings represented in the room – Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University of Texas – indicated that they use a videographer to capture video of professors teaching at the front of a room. None are currently using automated video solutions to accomplish that task. I know my institution can not afford to hire even part-time student workers to capture videos of that sort. However, seeing a video of a professor talking at the front of the room and writing on a standard white/chalkboard, I do not believe the investment in recording the talking professor is necessary or valuable. IF the primary use of the video will be for learners to review course content – in advance of or after a class session – a capture of what is being written along with the professor’s voice should be sufficient, and that can be accomplished by using a solution combining screencasting/audio with digital whiteboard technology. That reduces the cost of the solution in the first place and avoids the expense of a videographer. The value of capturing video of the professor, I believe, is dependent upon the need for enhancing or establishing her social presence; that should only be an issue for distance learning courses in which lecture capture will be used as a teaching tool.