Best Software For Putting Lectures Online? 126
An anonymous reader writes "I'm trying to help a school put their classes online in the way most minimally invasive to the teachers. A few environmental considerations: They don't always have live internet in the classroom, or I'd just run to Skype. I'm hoping to make it as much one-touch start/stop as possible to start recording, stop recording, and upload to a server. I'd like to believe others here have already done something similar, so if a package or process worked for you, that would be great to hear. Not sure what if it's all PowerPoint lectures, or if they actually use a whiteboard, and if so what the best camera would be to use (on a school budget!)."
tegrity (Score:2, Informative)
fits all the bills you mention
Matterhorn or Camtasia Relay (Score:5, Informative)
Online Lectures (Score:4, Informative)
The Open University uses something called 'Elluminate' it's fairly low badwidth though and fairly sure it needs an internet connection. You could always go proper oldskool and knock up a few multimedia CD-ROMs using Dreamweaver or whatever.
If you're just going to be speaking then a movie is fine but some of the other options would enable them not to have their face plastered all over it if they preferred.
Windows Media Encoder 9 (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, it is older and not supported anymore, but still works on modern OSes fine. Has a screen capture mode that works great. You start it and it just captures what happens on the screen until you hit stop. Very easy to use. Additionally, it has a codec called Windows Media Screen which uses compression well suited to static computer images. You can get a whole hour long lecture in like 30MB if space is a concern.
You just have the instructor wear a mic that feeds in to the computer's input (if the room has sound reinforcement just split off a feed from that) and students get all their slides and what they were saying while they did it. Means they can run programs too and demo that.
For easiest results, record in regular Windows Media format, which takes up way more space, but you can upload that right to Youtube. If you let them know what you are doing they'll let you have longer videos.
In terms of recording whiteboards and so on, I don't know of anything both easy and cheap. An AVCHD cam does a great job, but you usually need to spend a little time in a video editor afterwards. There are some high end capture solutions, but as the term "high end" implies, you don't really want to know what they cost.
if net access is not relaible then.. (Score:4, Informative)
As a starting point, make the actual videos downloadable or on DVD with a "quiz" style menu.
Check out the Stanford On-line courses. http://www.db-class.org/course/auth/welcome [db-class.org] That's probably about the style you're looking for.
Course Lectures split in to blocks of 10-15 mins each, with a small True/False or Multi-Choice quiz at the end. (you can do this with DVD's it just takes a bit of planning with the menus when authoring the DVD.)
All supported by PDF of Teacher & Student lecture notes and examples on a single DVD.
Simples....
Re:tegrity (Score:4, Informative)
A similar option is Adobe Connect. My Statics/Dynamics professor, in addition to the regular in-class lectures, had a Monday night online-only lecture where he had a headset microphone and a Fujitsu convertible tablet where, via live screen capture, he worked out homework/review problems on our screens and talked us through it. If we had questions, we would type it into the chat area and he would answer them through the microphone. I don't know how expensive it is, though. (I imagine it's not cheap)
Re:Youtube. (Score:5, Informative)
If you "verify" your YouTube account with a mobile phone, they remove the length limits (which are otherwise 15 mins), though there's still some sort of (quite high) filesize limit. That's why it's possible for there to be things like 100 hours of Nyan Cat.
Define your needs first (Score:5, Informative)
These are nontrivial considerations, and often overlooked. I've been recording my calculus lectures at my university (Stony Brook), which has Echo360. Unfortunately, our setup is (a) expensive, and (b) useless for my discipline (mathematics), because it cannot capture 16 feet of blackboard in a way that can be read later, especially if you also sometimes use a data projector (which I do). It works fine for power-point oriented lectures, but you can't do mathematics properly via power point, because students need to see the problems being worked, and need to refer to the beginning of the problem (so it doesn't fit on a single slide).
What has worked for me is to set up a pair of HD cameras in the back of the room, pointed so each can see (part of) the blackboard. Then I post-process this into a single video stream later. If I am using a data projector, I also grab the stream from Echo360. (I've also made multiple synchronized streams on a web-page using JWplayer, but this doesn't work as well)
Unfortunately, this is not a turn-key solution.
Something like matterhorn might be helpful too, but you really need consider all of the content needs before deciding on a delivery mechanism.
Guaranteed to suck done that way (Score:5, Informative)
"I'm trying to help a school put their classes online in the way most minimally invasive to the teachers." That guarantees a worthless product.
Recorded lectures aren't that great to begin with. On top of that, most of the useful content is on the board or the slides, so you want a format which emphasizes them, not the speaker. A fixed wide-angle shot of the front of the room is almost useless.
One little trick Stanford used for years was having presenters write on a paper pad, which was picked up by an overhead camera and projected to the students as well as being recorded. The pad was only 5" x 7", so that the instructor couldn't overfill a single page with more text than would survive mediocre analog TV.
Techsmith Relay / Camtasia (Score:5, Informative)
At Michigan State University, we have a Techsmith Relay server. The instructor just puts in the USB thumb drive, the auto-run runs, and they just have to type in their lecture's name and hit "Start". It is recorded to the USB or automatically uploaded to our capturing server if they are on the network. It can automatically be pushed out to our LMS (Angel / Moodle), or posted on a webpage for people to access. Works on both Win and Mac, and doesn't need anything installed, which is super-nice.
I've recorded a LOT of sessions with Camtasia as well. Great product, with tons of bells and whistles, but it does require the user to do the work of editing and encoding. That's great for me (I can edit it before I post), but not great for people who just want it to get out of their way.
http://www.techsmith.com/ [techsmith.com]
Re:if net access is not relaible then.. (Score:2, Informative)
I took the Stanford database course and I was impressed by the content, length, pace, and it's availability to all of the 93,000+ people who signed up. I haven't taken a true academic course for over 45 years and I was truly impressed with what appears to be the next wave of educational presentation.
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Informative)
You could set up your own video server and use VLC to deal with the streaming or whatever, but frankly YouTube is the way to go. Zero fees for your bandwidth (hell, they PAY you if you're popular enough!), and there's enough "YouTube Ready!" basic camcorders which come with very basic but easy to use software that you can get very close to "start, stop, upload". Frankly, if somebody isn't able to take a single video file and upload it to YouTube then they shouldn't be lecturing on anything, to anyone.
There's a multi-billion dollar infrastructure there for free. Use it!