Best Practice Showcase

The presentation of recorded lectures and other talks takes various forms these days: Simple combinations of audio and presentation, combination with presenters‘ video („talking head“), picture-in-picture with optional re-sizing and highlighting of the two elements (video and presentation) or a synchronized side by side – the options are manifold. While they are able to convey the content of the recording, their visual appeal is limited when compared to customized productions or TV-style webcasts.

Although recording and streaming lecture videos is becoming popular, large-scale lecture recording is still a difficult task for many universities. Auto lecture recording systems with robotic tripod or smart sensors are too expensive to be standard equipment in many classrooms. A simple solution of human-operated recording is also resource intensive from the perspective of hiring, training, and managing operators.

I do a lot of local presentation capture for the MIT Club of Northern California using our NCast Telepresenter capture stations (http://www.ncast.com). I've posted a bunch of this stuff on Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com) for high-resolution playback. One of the captures I did is still one of my all-time favorites, a talk about the history of the Universe by Dr. George Smoot. Here is a link to a short snippet of this lecture: http://www.vimeo.com/371629

I've been developing auto lecture recording system since 2008. As a key component of the system, I have implemented a prototype of virtual camerawork(post-processing camerawork) generator. In our setting, we record the entire classroom with a fixed high-definition(1920x1080) camcorder. Then, generate a camera work that traces region of interest. Finally, a trimmed
version (720x480) of video is generated.

When I was a faculty member of the department of information systems at Tottori University of Environmental Studies, I have developed a video archive system for daily manual recording. Since 2004, the department has been recording all lectures by camcorders and streaming them through a campus network. A unique aspect of the activity is that all videos are manually recorded by student staff without expensive auto-recording equipment. We record about 300 lectures in one semester, which means that we have to process twenty videos a week.

Dear all

I saw the 1^st media dissemination event recordings made by Switch, they are of excellent quality. By watching these recordings I could go over topics of my interest once again. Many thanks to Switch and Terena for organizing and recording this workshop.

I would like in this post to introduce some features of the Tel Aviv University  (TAU ) solution for academic lecture recording.

The OSU College of Medicine's current system of lecture capture used for first and second year medical students uses a variety of open source applications to record and deliver asynchronous learning objects securely to users.  The system is composed of: the TeleTeachingTool, Sun’s Java Runtime Environment, Tight VNC, Open Secure Shell, Samba rsync, PHP, Apache web server, Secure Socket Layer, Shibboleth, Perl, and AWStats.  The recording machines run Windows XP and the podcast.osumc.edu server runs CentOS.

Mediavision Courseware is a video-centric course management system developed at Case Western Reserve University. 

The virtPresenter Framework is designed for automatic production of lecture recordings. It can be scaled easily and is available as open source software. The manual effort for technicians and support has been reduced on less than one-eighth of the recording-time. The output formats, that should be be produced, can be individually defined. Possible output formats are: Video and slides synchronously, Audio Podcast, Video Podcast and Enhanced Podcast.