Presenting away for Weblectures

Yes, I know it is getting a bit boring: this blog is getting filled up with the weblectures project. I suppose this is only a correct representation on how I am spending my working hours at present...
The project is now really underway. The buzz is obviously spreading at Utrecht University. I have given presentations for the ICT in ed representatives of all the faculties and for the Heads of Education at Social Sciences. The university board visited Social Sciences and requested a presentation, so that is what I delivered. You will find the presentation here (long live Slideshare). If the embedded presentation won't load visit http://www.slideshare.net/kgrussell/weblectures-presentation-for-university-board/1




Next week there will be a seminar on internationalising our education and we will be present of course ;-).
It is very interesting to see the interest expressed by different departments within the university. It is also interesting to see the differences in motivation. Chemistry wanted to give some part time students a chance to watch lectures, Social Sciences' Graduate School is collaborating in a distance learning programme and they are creating short lectures specifically for this purpose in our studio. Maths wants to document lectures so students can view whenever they want, at any point in their studies, Studium Generale offers public lectures which they want to be accessible to a wider audience, students are bugging teachers to have their lectures recorded so they can revise before exams, and so on....

Kick off meeting project group Weblectures

We had a kick off meeting for the project group (and a few other interested staff members) of the Weblectures project. Although the project started back in January it was good to take the time to stand back and look at what everybody had accomplished in only a short time. I am extremely chuffed to see how far we have come! Of course we are not there yet and it isn't perfect but we definitely out on the road recording. (A careful estimate is 30 lectures recorded to date).

For more information on the project visit http://gathering.let.uu.nl/weblectures soon to be moved to http://www.uu.nl/weblectures

Apreso recording set is now on wheels!

Our AV guys were not very happy lugging the Apreso recording PC around so they screwed together this very straightforward but practical solution. In fact the screwing was very literal! But the result is a quick and easy set up that can be rolled about and set up in hardly any time at all! The timing function makes it even more practical: they can set the timer, walk away and pick it up when its done!
It is not exactly the way the set up was intended to be used but it works a treat.

Recording Lectures at Utrecht University

The last weeks before Christmas were an exciting time. I was busy writing an application for funding for a pilot for the recording of lectures at Utrecht University. And I can now announce the good news: The application has been accepted and we can now start up the project. We have chosen the following approach:

• Utrecht University has lectures at two locations: the town centre and the out of town campus. Two recording sets will be available: one for each location.


• Only one playback set will be set up. This may seem obvious to some, but others that know Utrecht University will understand the significance of this fact.


• This is a pilot for one year. This will give us the chance to gain some more experience not only with the software, but more importantly on the effects this has on learning and teaching.


• We have chosen to try out the Apreso Classroom solution for a year. We are very intrigued how it will work out. It appears to be a fairly straightforward solution with good connections to both Blackboard and WebCT.

For all those interested in our findings: it will be a while before we have a set up and running, so please bear with us...

Attending a lecture even though it is recorded

I just ran into a brilliant ditty on some of the surpising consequences of recording and broadcasting lectures. Do have a look at:
http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/highered/archive/2006/10/20/1769.html

The comment was placed by somebody who remains nameless but I simply must quote it here:

One of the funny uses of the video: one student, whenever he fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the class, he wrote down the time so that (apparently), when the video came out, he can index into the video to know when he woke up and when he was sleeping!

But seriously: the rest of the article does point at a number of aspects which appear regularly in articles on recorded lectures: attendance does not drop significantly, students behaviour during the lecture is different, students find it great if they cannot attend a lecture. In fact today at Eindhoven (see my previous posting) Michiel mentioned that the dropping out of a series of lectures appeared to lessen as students could cover a lecture they had missed, rather than giving up on the series entirely. This might be an interesting aspect for more complex subjects (e.g. statistics) in which for some students missing one lecture, means missing the whole jist of the subject. Please note: this is conjecture, but worth an examination none the less.

Recording lectures on a larger scale

Today we (a number of people from Utrecht University, Amsterdam and Maastricht) visited the Eindhoven University of Technology to see their approach for recording lectures. It was a very valuable and interesting talk. Many thanks to Michiel Schok for giving us some of his scarce time.

There were a number of interesting lessons I recognised from the approach in Eindhoven:

• There are a lot of different parties that need to be involved (just have a look at the slide Michiel is showing off here ;-)
• In Eindhoven they have chosen to go for a broad approach: they are managing to capture 50 hours of lectures every week using three capture sets. Respect!
• Try to work with fixed sets, this saves a lot of hassle and allows for easier recording. This does mean you have to take the assigning of specific lecture halls into account.
• A discussion arose regarding the pedagogical implications of recording and broadcasting lectures. Interestingly the main arguments for the present use of recording lectures at Eindhoven is to allow the current student to review their lecture, view a missed lecture and to get new groups to be able to view lectures they were otherwise unable to attend.
  The discussion arose whether this was a bad thing. Personally I do not believe this to be a bad approach at all. This does in fact mimic the adoption pattern of VLE's over the past years. New technology is being used as an extra facility to enhance learning and few teachers are using this as a substitute to a lecture itself, yet.
  I believe that teachers need the chance to get used to this new technology with all the advantages (and disadvantages) it has to offer. There are bound to be a few early adopters who will pick up on the possibilities and innovation will grow from there on. For a widespread innovative use of this technology I believe the use will first have to become 'economical' for the teacher. In this calculation I would include cost (hours invested by the teacher) versus output (learning outcomes and time saved).
  So for now I would strive for a broad adoption at a basic level. If I see the enthousiasm with which students are responding in Eindhoven (and to our small scale pilot) it definitely makes it worth while.
• Eindhoven is using the Mediasite hardware and software. As I had already learned from earlier quotes, this is by no means a cheap solution. However, the manual operation of the recording sets is also an expensive part of the financial picture. This encourages me further to work towards an operator free recording of lectures. Only in that manner can you manage to cost effectively record a lot of lectures. The quality of the camera work will be less, but you can also offer customers the option of paying more for a lecture which has been recorded by an operator.
• I was wondering how important the features Live Streaming and Editing where. I was interested to hear that these were not being used much at all in Eindhoven.

So all in all a very interesting visit. Many thanks again to Michiel.