U Bath Extends Reach of Green Education with Lecture Capture

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 03/24/09

A British university has selected a lecture capture platform from a Carnegie Mellon spinoff to help it deliver new distance learning classes on carbon footprinting.

The University of Bath's Integrated Environmental Management program has selected Panopto's CourseCast to help extend the reach of conferences and courses on carbon footprints. The campus has just begun delivering training to students in the area of product and service carbon footprinting and carbon labeling. The training is designed to help organizations learn how to use carbon footprint skills to achieve economic and environmental benefits.

"Industry and public services are facing a new era of carbon management in which the carbon content of their products and services will become an important buying factor. Aiming to 'practice what we preach,' we will monitor and reduce travel-related carbon footprint impacts of our own training services wherever possible," said Thom Bunting, teaching fellow and project leader of the Carbon Footprinting Skills Initiative. "Panopto's platform helps us quickly capture, replicate, and disseminate conference presentations and other learning activities. This can help us extend the reach of world-class expertise--without accumulating massive 'learning miles.' We are interested in extending the reach of conferences and courses and reducing their carbon footprints."

CourseCast's core components include classroom and desktop lecture capture, Web streaming, indexing (via PowerPoint and student notes), search (at the course and individual session level), Web-based editing, and archiving. CourseCast requires no proprietary hardware or software. The Panopto CourseCast software runs on industry-standard laptops, desktops, and servers.

The company provides its lecture capture technology free to academic institutions through The Socrates Project. In exchange for free access to the software, participants are asked to support the program with references, quotes, and case studies and to provide product feedback by participating in the company's developer and beta programs. Participants include Carnegie Mellon itself, where the platform was developed, and the University of Pittsburgh, among others.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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