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Class Capture: Getting Ready to Press Record

university-0814MOOCS, class capture, blended learning and flipped classrooms are all the buzz in today’s higher education tech world. Several factors drive these changes in technology and pedagogy. Some institutions are trying to find ways to cut costs, others are trying to figure out ways to make some extra money and many are simply trying to make sure they use every available tool to reach students. As technology managers, when these mandate comes down we need to be ready to act.

Most of these technologies start with some setup of camera and microphones in the classroom. At Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, we have been fortunate enough to move thoughtfully and patiently through this process. We have taken our time in understanding what our faculty want and being ready with the technology when they are ready with the pedagogy. When your faculty are ready, you will want to be ready as well. Here are some thoughts to help you when you start this journey.

Decision Points

The first thing that will drive your decision is cost of the equipment, current and potential institutional buy in and any possible income that you may see from the equipment. Large universities have been very creative in finding ways to save money through class capture. I know of a couple of universities that will overschedule their very large, introductory classes. They may have a 250 seat classroom, but will book 400 or so students in it. The instructor tells half the students that they can attend on Tuesday, and the other half can attend on Thursday. Double the number of students, with the same cost of the professor. They keep the same number of Teaching Assistants, so everyone get the same “personal” touch they would if there were two classes. In a situation like this, making a significant investment is very worthwhile. You make that money back quickly. Also, the extra cost allows for systems that are very integrated and redundant. The redundancy is critical in a case like this, because if your systems fail, classes need to be re-taught by the instructor, and your benefit quickly disappears.

The other end of this spectrum would be a single student enrolled in a course, who may have hearing or visual difficulties. A massive investment may not pay back in this case, as hiring a note taker, or providing the student with a personal recording device, may provide the needed support, at a much lower cost. Your institution is likely to fall somewhere in between these extremes, and knowing that fit will be critical to your success.

This quickly brings us to our next decision point, scalability. The larger, expensive systems are inherently scalable. Required equipment, even from the beginning is designed so that you can easily (but not necessarily cheaply) increase the number of rooms you want to capture in. They are truly an integrated system. Typically, the less money you invest in your system, the more work you need to do in order to make a scalable, integrated system. If you are using a webcam to record a class, and recording it to the local computer, the costs may be scalable, but the support that would need to be provided would not be scalable. Many institutions start out with some type of low cost solution, as either an answer to a particular need for a faculty member, or as a “build it and they will come model.” I strongly recommend that Technology Managers think twice about initiating some type of small, non-scalable (in terms of service or equipment) solution. It is very hard to go backwards, and once a single professor is invested in a solution, it is hard to get them to change, and to convince others that the solution is not easy to deploy in multiple rooms. Before long you will find yourself in the class regularly helping to solve problems, many of which you created in the first place.

A second, but no less critical, piece of scalability has to do with the storage of the recordings. At Bates College, we estimate a class recorded in its entirety for the semester, will take over 30 GB of space. In order to make this easily viewable by the students in the course, you need to provide some type of video server and management of that server. Here again, the one-off where a professor uses their online video account (like YouTube) may be satisfactory for that one professor in that one instance. However, it will not serve the institution well when you are trying to manage 5, 10 or 20 professors doing the same thing. Scalability in terms of storage does not mean that you need a free solution as you grow, it means that you need a clear path to grow as your faculty use increases.

A final decision factor that I believe needs to be considered is whether you will provide a hardware solution or a software solution.  Hardware solutions, are devices that sit in the video flow of your room and simply take the feed as it travels to the display and record it. Software systems take a feed into your computer and record a file directly to your hard drive. Because you are adding an extra piece of equipment, hardware solutions tend to be more expensive. I personally like them, because if something goes wrong with the recording hardware, it does not affect the presentation in the room. You may lose your recording, and that is a problem, but if the entire live presentation fails, that is a BIG problem. For me, this is a question of fault tolerance and ease of use. Only you can know how your institution would answer these questions.

Lessons Learned

After having done class capture for several semesters, we have learned some lessons, several of them “the hard way.” I write about them in hopes that you can learn from our mistakes. The first and most important thing we learned is that you NEED a confidence monitor. Yes, it is more expensive. Yes, it often adds some complexity to your design. Yes, you will have failures if you don’t include one in your rooms. The most obvious purpose of a confidence monitor is so that your faculty can have confidence that they are recording what they want. We have seen issues where a faculty member recorded a lecture where the camera was capturing a shot of the ceiling. Someone had bumped the camera, and without a confidence monitor the faculty was not aware. We have also seen scenarios where a speaker continually walks off the frame of the camera. Again, due to that professor not having a visual reference that they had left the frame.

Ease of of use is also critical to your users. We have found that our faculty are interested in spending about 30-60 seconds at the start of a lecture, to set up the recording. If it takes longer than that, they stop. The systems we use have a tremendous amount of options with picture in picture, cameras, presets, sources and recording bit rates. It is simply too much for a faculty member to have to worry about when they walk into a room.  We developed a system where faculty walk into the room, enter their own code, and the system sets up according to their preferences. These preferences were set with a member of the technology staff in a short meeting before the semester. It happens in less than 60 seconds, and they immediately see what will be recorded on the local confidence monitor.

The other important factor with ease of use is what to do with the recordings. As mentioned earlier, you need some type of scalable, manageable solution to stream the videos. However, the question remains of how do you get your videos to that server?  The most popular options are to SFTP the video to the server when you are finished recording, or to record onto a thumb drive and upload it manually. As one can guess, the automatic upload tends to be more expensive than the manual method. However, which ever method you choose, make sure you select a server that makes the upload and management of the video easy. A good measure of “easy” is how long does it take to get the upload started? I would suggest that if within 2 minutes of sitting at their computer, the faculty should have the upload started. Longer than that, and they will lose interest.

Privacy

After talking this over on many occasions with our registrar and CIO, I know better than to give any advice on this subject. The only thing I will tell you is there ARE privacy and security concerns. This material IS part of the students record and must be protected and treated as such. Before you move forward with any recordings in your classes, make sure you have the answers on whether your implementation fits with the FERPA and HIPPA guidelines.

Creativity

Through our implementation of class capture we have found some very creative ways to use the equipment. The single money saving opportunity we found was the ability to record events in classrooms. Historically, our media services group has recorded events for archival or web distribution purposes. Over the past few years, the demand has grown, but the budget for the service has not. We are now finding that many of our users are satisfied with the recording that is done with the class capture equipment in the room. Every time we are able to use this equipment, and not outsource a videographer, we save hundreds of dollars.

Several of our customers noted the cameras and microphones in the rooms and asked us if that meant they could do web conferencing in the rooms. Our response went from no, to let us think about it, to yes. We started bringing the video from a camera in the front of the room, along with the audio from the microphones into a Vaddio USB Bridge. That bridge is seen by the computer as a standard webcam. Suddenly, for a small additional investment, we were able to bring web conferencing into our rooms.

Recently we have discovered that our systems allow us to stream.  This gives us the capability to bring our programming to the outside world. We are still working on this issue, as there are questions about production levels when putting something out on the internet. However, it does let us do overflow, either across the hall, or across the world.  Recently, an athletic team wanted to have a team meeting, but had several team members spread out abroad. The meeting took place in a capture room, and was streamed. The URL was privately shared with the team members, and they were able to watch the meeting. Important note, this was done with no added expenses.

With pressure being put on budgets at all institutions, “build it and they will come” is no longer a viable option. Also, the days of trying out an expensive system and then deciding it is not what you want, are gone. You need to install systems that will solve the problems that your customers are presenting to you. You need to understand where that need will grow and be prepared to grow with it.

Image Copyright: kawing921 / 123RF Stock Photo

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