Recording lectures should be simple

Overview

There are several diferent software to record your lectures and they try to integrate themselves to PowerPoint and other kind of software. How long do you take, after you enter your classroom, to start recording your lecture? We included the recording feature on Classroom Presenter and changed that time in a few seconds. We also integrated that to a server side software so that you only need to click on the "Submit to server" option and everything will be transfered automatically.

How simple can it be?

Classroom Presenter already import PowerPoint slides. We integrated a video recording feature on it. The picture below shows a screenshot of our software:

Modified Classroom Presenter

What is the diference? The only diference is the rightmost side buttom, to record the class. At the beginning of each class, the instructor should only press this button to start recording. After that, a screen with class information will appear, like the next one:

Recorder configuration

Only two pieces of information are required here: Lecture title and description. The other are for checking purpuses: headset and video folder. After pressing ok, the recording will start. To finish it, just press the record button again (it will remain pressed during recording and you need to release it to finish). You can record any number of pieces of classes by start-stop video recording whenever you want.

When you finish your recording, you can upload the contents to the server by using the "Export Video to Server" option on the File Menu. In this way, everything necessary will be done and your students will be able to see the videos online. For now, we implemented a very simple video server but we have already started to integrate this funcitonality to Moodle. Our current video server looks like:

Available disciplines

This picture shows the available disciplines for the student. By clicking on the disciplin, the students are directed to the recorded lectures, as below:

Available Lectures

In this web page, the student can select the lecture he/she want to view. Together with the lectures are the slides available. After selecting the lecture, the students can see it in a browser, much like a Youtube video, as below (content not playable here):

Web lecture

This video can be played whenever and wherever the students want. We have implemented an index feature by puting the slides used during the classes on the bottom of the video. By selecting one slide, the video moves to the point the instructor talked about it. If one slide is used more than once, it will appear more than once in the index. Since the index is a small slide, if the user moves the mouse over it, it gets zoomed to facilitate the selection.

This video recording feature is being used at Unicamp and we have some evaluations on that. See the paper on WIPTE 2009.

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