Lecture Capture

U Leeds Adds Lecture Capture to 250 Teaching Spaces

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 10/20/14

The University of Leeds has rolled out a new lecture capture platform to allow students to review lectures and access recordings of other classroom activities.

"The University has invested more than $3 million to set up the new system which will record up to 50,000 hours of teaching activity every academic year," according to a news release. "About 250 teaching spaces in the University have been equipped with the technology which was installed by Universal AV and AV2000. Once lectures have been captured, they will be made available within the University's virtual learning environment (VLE)."

"The new technology gives students the chance to learn and study at their own pace and will let them revisit course content at any point in the year," said Professor Neil Morris, director of digital learning at the University of Leeds, in a prepared statement. "This campus-wide deployment of new digital tools has been rolled out to ensure that students can access and benefit from the new system from the beginning of term."

The system is built on Sonic Foundry's Mediasite Enterprise Video Platform with Mediasite Recorders that capture lectures for students to watch live or on-demand via the school's VLE. The university also adopted the company's desktop capture software, My Mediasite, to allow students and faculty to create and share presentations from desktop computers and mobile devices.

"There is a lot of excitement about the new lecture capture system — the system is not just a simple and effective way of recording lectures, but opens up a whole new world of teaching techniques," said Christopher Hassall, lecturer in animal biology at the University of Leeds, in a news release. "I have heard a number of staff talking enthusiastically about trying innovative approaches to teaching that simply would not have been possible without this big investment. For example, the traditional model of teaching would be to give a lecture during class and send the students away to read around the topic. With the new system we can share pre-recorded lectures with students before class and use contact time for discussions and other activities that help to develop learning from the recorded lectures. It is certainly an interesting time to be teaching at Leeds, and I know that the students are going to be impressed."