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Podcasting on a Shoestring
Community college turns to open source and used computers for captured lectures
11/14/2007
"We're giving away, as a software product, something that would cost $10,000 to $20,000," according to Dawson. His rational: Targeting the higher education market dictates open source to reduce costs. That shifts responsibility to schools to find and support older hardware, but he thinks that can pay off for many colleges and universities.
Podcast-in-a-Box can be downloaded for free from the Box Populi site onto a CD, then loaded onto each computer to be used for podcasting. To make a recording, a user simply inserts a USB flash memory device into the computer. That action triggers the Podcast-in-a-Box software, and a podcast recording begins automatically, continuing until the device is removed.
Via the network, the audio files are sent to a Box Populi server without involvement from LATTC staff or the instructor. Box Populi then publishes an RSS feed (a piece of code that publishes the files onto any Web site automatically).
Filters place a podcast episode file into the proper feed in the Box Populi system.
The software is set up at LATTC so that when an instructor uses his or her personal USB device at a given time and day, the resulting podcast file is published to the appropriate place.
For customers with a bigger budget than LATTC, Box Populi also sells a dedicated podcasting appliance with software loaded and ready to go. A support contract is also available, which includes installation and use support, updates, access to a bug reporting and feature request system, and an MP3 encoder license.
"Chris wrote the software for me," Delzeit-McIntyre said. "His parents were educators.... He wanted to take this project and make it affordable for us." Box Populi now has a number of customers in higher education, including several schools in the University of California system, as well as Drexel University and the University of Michigan.
For the additional pieces of software she needed, Delzeit-McIntyre is using a free operating system called Wantu, along with Firefox as her browser of choice, and Microsoft's free Audacity software for editing audio files when needed. The school also pays an MP3 licensing fee, as required of anyone who uses MP3 encoding software.
Box Populi hardware
Delzeit-McIntyre said she's made the already simple system as easy for instructors to use as possible. She trains faculty by giving a brief overview of the project to groups of instructors, then issues a thumb drive and the needed software key and a microphone. Instructors can simply enter the classroom, plug in the flash drive they've been issued, and begin talking. They remove the flash drive at the end of the session, access the recorded file later via the Internet to add a lecture title and description, then post the recording to LATTC's Moodle course management system. Since the recordings are simply MP3 files, they can be edited by instructors with introductions and endings, if needed, such as copyright statements.
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