These are my notes from the Thursday, October 30th EDUCAUSE 2008 session, “REPLAY: An Integrated and Open Solution to Produce, Handle, and Distribute Audiovisual Lecture Recordings,” presented by Olaf A. Schulte, Multimedia Services, ETH Zurich
Olaf and his team developed REPLAY to streamline the capture and upload of lecture recordings. Their application is very impressive, including a scheduling feature and the beginnings of a very interesting indexing system for searching captured content. There is a connection to iTunes U, serious automation for reducing instructor workload and errors, easy admin resources for technical support staff, and the resulting content is not “melted” into one movie file. All assets can be accessed separately by students.
REPLAY uses PLAYMOBIL, a linux-based machine with a NCast capture card for VGA and audio, and Nio security cameras for classroom video capture. One of the funnier challenges they faced involved having to “tranquilize” the cameras because they were tracking instructor hand movements.
REPLAY will be ready for action in February, 2009. However, they plan to join the Opencast community, so you may not see it as an independent entity for very long. On the plus side, cool REPLAY features and functions will hopefully make their way into the Opencast system and I can only assume that the effort will benefit greatly by the inclusion of the ETH team.
As I was sitting in this session, my mind wandered to our motives for supporting live lecture capture and the impact this will have on higher education. I have really struggled with this over the years, resisting the pitches of companies like Tegrity to spend tens of thousands of dollars on their, “capture everything that moves,” solutions. Instead, I have been drawn to tools like DyKnow, that also capture classroom activity, but facilitate the transformation of classroom interaction from traditional lecture to more collaborative and active practices. That being said, I would never obstruct students who can learn just as effectively by watching a recorded lecture as they can by attending that same lecture in a classroom. More power to them. I would also never dream of depriving students of reviewing information presented to them as many times as they desired or of consigning them to the arduous and counterproductive task of transcribing what comes out of an instructor’s mouth. For these reasons alone, lecture capture solutions may be worthwhile. I think supporting traditional lecture capture across the enterprise makes me uncomfortable for other reasons.
Traditional lecture can be very engaging and there are certainly some lecture performances that are best experienced live. However, when migrating most traditional lectures to an online format, you inevitably realize that learners would be much better served and technology would be much better leveraged if the typical 50-minute lecture was produced, packaged, and delivered differently. Technology offers opportunities to do just that. We seem so impressed by lecture capture solutions that only require instructors to press “Record,” but the truth is that this level of usability can be found in a variety of today’s tools and faculty can generally create much more effective and engaging online content from the comfort of their own offices than from the stage of an overcrowded lecture hall.
As the purpose of class meetings transitions from information delivery to discussion and collaboration, I look for traditional lecture capture tools to fade into obsolescence and for tools that support communication and teamwork to become more valuable. We are not there yet, so live lecture capture still seems like a good idea. But is it? Are we doing this simply because we can? How does investing in tools like Tegrity impact classroom design? Are we more likely to design “Tegrity-ready” lecture halls? If there’s no pedagogical reason to capture most live lectures and most instructors would rather teach differently anyway, why invest in tools that perpetuate this method of instruction? Do we want to simply capture what’s going on in our classrooms or do we want to facilitate change? Let’s give this a little nudge by making it easier to collaborate in class and assisting instructors to develop online content and activities that really engage students.
Ken
The WSU eLearner 
3 comments
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November 23, 2008 at 8:13 pm
derekbruff
You’ve captured my feelings about lecture capture pretty well here, Ken. I agree that lecture capture can help students review and minimize the need for transcription-style notetaking. However, if watching a video of an instructor is as beneficial to students as attending a live lecture, then what’s the point of making students show up at a particular time and place to experience a lecture?
You make a good point that lecture capture tools might be better used to create videos produced in an instructor’s office for students to watch before coming to class. Students and their instructors are only together face-to-face a few hours a week. It seems to me that that time should be spent doing what can only be done when the teacher and learners are all in the same room together–discussion, collaboration, other interactive learning activities.
I see a lot of potential in classroom collaboration tools like DyKnow to facilitate more effective learning experiences for students. And I worry that easy-to-use lecture capture tools will discourage instructors from using active learning techniques by encouraging them to lecture more.
There’s a sign posted in one of our classrooms on campus that read, “Please close the classroom door while lecturing as a courtesy to those with offices nearby.” Someone I admire drew a line through the word “lecturing” and wrote in “teaching.” Too often those words are used interchangeably!
December 3, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Olaf A. Schulte
Dear Ken, thanks for the favourable review. With regard to your considerations about the role of lecture recordings, I would like to add the perspective of creating a “teaching knowledge pool” with these videos for students to dive into looking for answers to specific problems. Today’s and especially tomorrow’s (semantic) search technologies give them the power to do so and REPLAY will be the basis for this.
Just one minor erratum: REPLAY will not use Epiphan products (today, we use them for classic podcasting), but PLAYMOBIL, a linux-based machine with a NCast capture card for VGA and audio, combined with the NIO camera tracking system.
December 3, 2008 at 8:33 pm
kgraetz
Hello Olaf…GREAT presentation. In fact, we talked about you today in our Technology and eLearning Advisory Committee meeting! Thanks for the correction. I made the adjustment in the post. I am also very excited about the possibility of an academic semantic web and was so interested in your indexing features…and on into OpenCast. I am really pushing for OpenCast here at WSU. I have just had such a negative “Blackboard-ish” experience when talking with companies like Tegrity that provide what seem to me to be monolithic, proprietary solutions where content becomes “trapped” in some significant way. I really appreciate your efforts.