Identifying sustainable strategies for the implementation of lecture capture technologies

This is the title of a comprehensive report put together by Dr John Couperthwaite of the University of Birmingham. He was fortunate to gain some funding from the Universitas21 initiative which enabled him to visit and learn from Australian universities that have been using lecture capture for some years. He has used the insights gained to create a comprehensive list of recommendations for the introduction of an institutional lecture capture system, and it is interesting to compare these with the process adopted by Southampton. Overall, I feel our approach has been more exploratory and less prescriptive, as befits a pilot project as opposed to a strategic initiative, but I am reassured that we have considered and addressed the majority of the recommendations he lists.

The University of Birmingham Event Capture website can be compared with our own Panopto support website. Viewing their tutorial videos, two things struck me – first, how much I prefer narrated video to material produced using Adobe Captivate (the fake typing sound really annoys me) and secondly, how much easier the Panopto integration with Blackboard makes the whole process; Birmingham uses WebCT and so tutors need to manually copy-and-paste links from the Panopto server to WebCT items. They are also trialing Echo360, which does offer good integration with WebCT, so that may well clinch their final choice.

Panopto tutorial on offline recording

One of the pilot Panopto users encountered this worrying error message last week when she completed a recording:

All that had happened was that the wi-fi connection she used to log in and start a recording dropped, so the Recorder was unable to upload the files to the server. All we had to to do was close this error message by clicking Cancel, close the Panopto Recorder and upload the recording when she got back to her office.

This minor panic prompted me to produce another tutorial video that shows how to create recordings offline (i.e. where there is no internet access) and how to upload them later when you are online. Typical situations might include:

• rooms without a network connection (or where it is broken, which happened to me last week);
• rooms away from the University where there is no network, or you don’t have an account to access it;
• field trips, boats and other remote locations.

This ability to create recordings offline is a really useful feature of Panopto and will enable the University to create ad-hoc recordings wherever it wishes. For example an academic giving a guest lecture at another University will be able to capture their talk and make it available to students here, or a researcher on a ship in the Arctic will be able to use a good quality webcam to show students what working in those conditions is really like.

Using lecture capture to transform lectures

Here at Southampton we are just gearing up for the start of our lecture capture pilot project, based around Panopto. This is a software solution, so if the 30-licence pilot is successful we will be able to simply upgrade to a site licence to make it available in *all* our teaching spaces and on *every* tutor’s office PC. I strongly feel that having a few ‘specially equipped rooms’ (especially if they are the big lecture theatres) will make pedagogic transformation unlikely.

I will be encouraging our pilot users to consider how they might use lecture capture to make their face-to-face teaching more student-centred. Ideally, if there are elements of the lecture that are ‘content transmission’ then pre-record these and require the students to view them before attending a lecture which has more opportunity for questions, problems, discussion and in-depth consideration of key points. We shouldn’t underestimate the amount of tutor effort needed to reconfigure their teaching in this way, and students also will need careful induction and support into this mode of study. They need to understand that ‘watching the video’ is necessary, but not sufficient.

In adopting this model, one of the challenges faced by tutors is that recording material in your office is a very different experience to delivering it live. There is no feedback from an audience to help you sound enthusiastic, and the normal hesitations and repetitions can make the office recording seem very amateurish. There are also accessibility requirements to wrestle with and it seems clear that a pre-recorded ‘lecture’ will require a transcript (or even subtitles!) to meet legal obligations. One option is to work from a script, but that means that the tutors will have to write those scripts… much more work than simply turning up to the lecture hall and speaking.

My guess is that most of the pilot users will simply record live sessions, but I hope that a few will explore the potential of the technology and enable us to develop a few local case studies to encourage others to move beyond basic use.