We brought 4 lecture capture technology vendors to campus in December (2010) to present their products.
This event came at the end of an extensive due diligence process where the Academic Technology team evaluated over 13 products and filtered them out based on a variety of parameters such as feature set relevant to teaching and learning, enterprise-grade nature of the both the product and the company, product roadmap and the companies stated drive to stay on or ahead of the curve in this industry. Obviously costs (specifically lifecycle costs) are a very important factor in such evaluations, more on that in another post.
Over 50 faculty members showed up over the period of 4 days to see the vendor presentations. Many faculty indicated a desire to use lecture capture technology in their teaching.
Number of faculty interested in :
- Personal Lecture Capture - 45
- Lecture Capture in Traditional Classrooms - 35
- Lecture Capture in Walk-in studios - 20
We also asked for feedback on what features they thought would be useful in such a product, below is a heatmap of the various responses.
Other notable features folks were interested in were:
- MAC/PC Compatibility
- Ability to upload 3rd Party videos
- Indexing and Searching content
- Ability to Pause a recording
- Ability to export a recording to DVD
We also received feedback pertinent to each vendor's product, if you are interested in this information please get in touch with us directly.
Action Items for the month of Jan:
The AT Team will be digging deeper into the feedback and evaluating the products in more detail. Our hope is to narrow the vendors down to 2 finalists.
We are planning a similar vendor demo event with those 2 vendors, during the second week of Feb, we will host the demos both at the Durham and Manchester Campus and are working with our colleagues at UNH M for this.
We are reaching out to over 9 comparator schools to find out what they are doing with Lecture Capture.
There is a large body of work that needs to be done with planning the technical architecture of systems, lifecycle cost considerations and project planning in general.
As usual, please let us know what else is on your mind with regards to lecture capture, leave us comments on this blog or send us email.
Comments
Other features
Thank you Ben, great points. We will add these to the list and send them to the vendors before they come back in Feb.
All of this feedback is very valuable to vendors, they try pretty hard to incorporate features they don't already have.
Summarizing your feature requests :
- Ability to zoom into sections of the screen to show regions of the screen more clearly.
- Ability to see the status of transcoding and publish process.
- Ability to add meta data for content inside the capture to aid search.
Additional Comments
You have captured the need for the ability to edit the material before it is published. A critical part of that editing capability is the ability to zoom into a part of the image that may be important to the point being discussed. In courses where spreadsheets are used, the image of the spreadsheet without zooming may be illegible unless we are able to zoom in on the section of the spreadsheet that is being discussed at that time. Please put zooming as a critical component of the editing capabilities, not just cut and splice.You have also highlighted the need to know when a lecture is published. Equally important is some notification concerning when we can expect a lecture to be published, and when something has changed the schedule (heavy workload from students, or a glitch in the processing). Today at Parker Media Labs, we only get notified when it finishes successfully, and can wait for a week or more when there are heavy workloads. If the lectures hit a glitch, or there is a change in workload or schedule, there is no notification.In terms of Mac/PC compatibility, it must be complete. Not just a subset of the functionality.While some of the vendors include the ability to search text based materials, I did not hear about the ability to add meta data (searchable text) that would enable a student to find a photograph or picture that is embedded in the lecture. This could become important.
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