Bradley Bell, Tim Batzel and I demonstrated our latest offering of an automated video screen capture system at the Pack Forest Conference Center today. The system replicates the automated model of our audio podcasting system, and delivers flash video, screen capture and sound to students via our classroom portal. Students can view lectures using our operating-system agnostic flash media-player software and they can skip ahead in each lecture with pre-made Bookmarks.
I talked to the audience about how the explosive growth of user-generated content, including blogging, digital videos, digital audio, mobile phone photography, wikis, Twitter, and Flickr has us responding to the demands of students for on-line video recordings of their classes. Things are changing very quickly and there are some reservations by instructors because they perceive that videocasting has eaten into class attendance. Despite the reservations of instructors, many students appear to be enamored with the video offerings and use them to clarify concepts that may have been missed in class or as another source of material to study for exams."
Professor Jaime Diaz, Professor of Psychology, also presented about the use of technology in his classes. Professor Diaz surveyed his students and determined that 76% of learning occurs outside of classroom. He was very enthusiastic about the results of using podcasting in his class, and was very interested in our new video screen-casting system, developed using open source software.
What seems to have been lost in all the hype about podcasting is that our pilots – yes, pilots with an "s" – were about utilizing New Media in the educational environment. In October 2005, we also started an on-demand video pilot. If you think that the podcasting download numbers are impressive, consider the fact that 17 classes were video recorded and resulted in 47,684 downloads though Winter Quarter, 2007. From the very beginning, we sensed that video would be the favored New Media. And then came YouTube which had the effect of hitting the reset button on how everyone viewed the impact and utility of on-line video. While everyone was distracted by the buzz-factor of both podcasting and on-line video, we were perfecting our automated video capture system. And we’ve further developed this into an automated ScreenCasting system that combines high resolution video screen captures, traditional video recordings and spoken narration. The result is an end-product that conveys complex information and concepts easily and quickly – something that has been essential for the students in the biology class where we have been perfecting the technology over the past quarter.
I talked to the audience about how the explosive growth of user-generated content, including blogging, digital videos, digital audio, mobile phone photography, wikis, Twitter, and Flickr has us responding to the demands of students for on-line video recordings of their classes. Things are changing very quickly and there are some reservations by instructors because they perceive that videocasting has eaten into class attendance. Despite the reservations of instructors, many students appear to be enamored with the video offerings and use them to clarify concepts that may have been missed in class or as another source of material to study for exams."
Professor Jaime Diaz, Professor of Psychology, also presented about the use of technology in his classes. Professor Diaz surveyed his students and determined that 76% of learning occurs outside of classroom. He was very enthusiastic about the results of using podcasting in his class, and was very interested in our new video screen-casting system, developed using open source software.
What seems to have been lost in all the hype about podcasting is that our pilots – yes, pilots with an "s" – were about utilizing New Media in the educational environment. In October 2005, we also started an on-demand video pilot. If you think that the podcasting download numbers are impressive, consider the fact that 17 classes were video recorded and resulted in 47,684 downloads though Winter Quarter, 2007. From the very beginning, we sensed that video would be the favored New Media. And then came YouTube which had the effect of hitting the reset button on how everyone viewed the impact and utility of on-line video. While everyone was distracted by the buzz-factor of both podcasting and on-line video, we were perfecting our automated video capture system. And we’ve further developed this into an automated ScreenCasting system that combines high resolution video screen captures, traditional video recordings and spoken narration. The result is an end-product that conveys complex information and concepts easily and quickly – something that has been essential for the students in the biology class where we have been perfecting the technology over the past quarter.
