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50,000 Lectures and Counting

Lecture recording service is going mobile

 

In the past five years, Duke has recorded about 50,000 lectures and campus events.

Now lecture capture - technology that records videos of classroom lectures or events that can be streamed online, alongside supplementary documents or slides - is going mobile.

The new DukeCapture-Panopto service, available through Duke's Office of Information Technology, allows faculty, students and staff to record lectures, events and presentations using simple software that can be installed on any personal computer.

Presenters and viewers can edit and mark up the recordings with notes (shared or private) and can search that text, along with text in accompanying slides. Recordings are uploaded and automatically published to central Duke servers such as DukeStream, Blackboard and iTunes U.

About 65 rooms across campus are specifically configured for lecture capture, but mobile capture introduces new flexibility for users, said Samantha Earp, OIT's director of academic services.

"Mobile capture has been a huge untapped area for us, unchaining people from those rooms and making it easier to record impromptu conversations or to allow faculty at home to record narration to post in advance of a class," she said.

Lecture capture has become increasingly important for universities across the country, according to the 2010 Campus Computing Survey, the latest edition of the Campus Computing Project's annual census. About three-quarters of respondents from 523 nonprofit institutions described lecture capture as "an important part of (their) campus plan for developing and delivering instructional content."

Though some faculty fear that lecture capture might prompt students to skip class, research suggests that having lectures available for playback could help students retain lecture content.

At the Fuqua School of Business, which captures more than half of all its lectures in an average semester, the uses of lecture capture have expanded with the technology, said Tim Searles, Fuqua's director of multimedia.

Students have used the recordings to catch up with lectures on the plane trip home from job interviews or as review in preparation for an exam. He's also seen an increase in non-class use - from student clubs recording their meetings to work groups that meet during a symposium.

"We've also used it for administrative training sessions and all-hands meetings, since it's not always possible for everybody to be there," Searles said. "With the ease of recording and distribution, these digital tools have allowed us a lot more capability."

With increased globalization, lecture capture will prove even more important to bridge geographic locations and time differences, he said.

Find out more about DukeCapture at a Learn IT @ Lunch session, "Lectopia to Panopto: The DukeCapture Transition," on Dec. 8 from noon to 1 p.m. Visit the OIT website for details.