Winning Them Over
Looking for a way to bolster lecture capture enthusiasm on campus?
IN A 2008 SURVEY OF STUDENTS at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 82 percent of undergraduate
respondents said they preferred courses with online lecture
content, and 60 percent said they would even be willing
to pay for lecture capture services.
No similar national survey has been done on student receptivity
to lecture capture, but it’s probably safe to say that Wisconsin
students are not ahead of the curve on this topic. These
systems are catching on at colleges and universities across the
country, and the enthusiasm isn’t limited to students. Higher
ed administrators, as well as more and
more faculty, are seeing the benefits of
enabling students to review class material
at their own pace and catch up on
missed classes.
Yet campus IT leaders preparing to
introduce lecture capture may want to
tread lightly. Many early adopters have
experienced faculty resistance and questions
about policies ranging from copyright
to accessibility for disabled students
(see “Addressing Accessibility,” p. 40).
“The only way you’re going to get buy-in
from the academic side is if faculty perceive
it is valuable to their teaching experience,”
notes Marti Harris, a research
director at Gartner. “If faculty see it as
something that they are being forced to
do, schools will have difficulty achieving
a level of success.”
The trick is to have the technology,
training, and policy pieces in place from
the beginning, says Alan Greenberg, a
senior analyst at Wainhouse Research.
“There is a marketing component for the
instructional technology people. You have
to do training that explains how lecture
capture is going to help students and what
it’s going to mean to faculty, and you have
to have the policies and procedures in
place to support the users.
Colleges and universities that have gone down the lecture capture path have found four essential ingredients for bringing
faculty on board with the program:
- Start slowly and gather results.
- Work out copyright issues up front.
- Minimize faculty involvement with the technology
itself.
- Provide ongoing tech support.
If your campus is currently considering a lecture capture
pilot or is in the early stages of deployment—or has made
little progress because of faculty resistance—
you may benefit from considering
these practices that institutions have
used to successfully implement lecture
capture systems on their campuses.
1. Start Slowly and Gather Results
Anand Padmanabhan, chief information
officer of New York University’s Stern
School of Business, sees gradual introduction
as key to lecture capture success.
Stern started using Apreso (now
Echo360) in early 2005 to capture lectures
with a few faculty members who
had expressed interest. “We then encouraged
other faculty to come in, sample
it, see the setup, and do a short lecture,”
he explains.
Addressing Accessibility
LECTURE CAPTURE PRESENTS new challenges to universities charged with meeting federal
and state accessibility mandates. The instructional technology team at Seattle Pacific
University (WA) has long worked on disability issues, such as making websites accessible for
low-vision students. “We know we need to accommodate students, even though we may have a
limited budget for it,” says David Wicks, director of instructional technology services (ITS) and
an assistant professor in the School of Education.
For instance, as more faculty begin using Camtasia Relay to record lectures and other course
materials,Wicks knows SPU will have to offer a captioning solution for hearing-impaired students.
“We may not have that many hearing-impaired students at any one time,” however, “so doing captioning
for every course that uses lecture capture could be onerous and expensive.”
SPU has settled on a “just-in-time” model for providing closed-captioning. Faculty members
inform ITS when a hearing-impaired student is in a class that involves lecture capture, and student
workers are hired to transcribe those lectures. “It may just be audio over a PowerPoint
presentation, and some students may just want a transcript,”Wicks explains, “while others
would like us to go into Camtasia Studio and add the captions to the presentation.”
The College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Mediasite user, has
found a different solution. For the past year, the engineering school has been using Caption-
Sync, a captioning service from Automatic Sync Technologies. It takes about four hours for a
CaptionSync transcriber to type up a one-hour lecture, according to Automatic Sync, and
schools pay approximately $160 per media hour, with volume discounts available.
“There’s no way we could afford to do it for all recorded lectures,” says Dusty Smith, digital
media manager for the Wisconsin engineering school. “But about 50 to 60 times in the past
year, there were requests for captions on recorded lectures,” he says, adding that the process
has worked well.
The latest Mediasite version, which automates the integration with CaptionSync, also provides
search powered by the caption data. “That has the potential to be beneficial to a wider
audience than just the hearing impaired,” Smith says. “You could search for a phrase or an
equation and be taken to the point in the video where that is discussed.”