Last week you read about the new and updated e-classrooms, including several new lecture capturing classrooms. This week, I thought I’d expand a little bit more on the use of lecture capturing at WPI. As you read last week, we have installed the Echo360 technology in AK116, GH227, KH116, and SH106. That brings the total number of classrooms that have the technology installed to 13!
Lecture capturing means that a class or seminar is recorded as a video and posted to your myWPI course site. The capturing process records any output that goes to the projector, along with your voice, so students can review the content that is presented in class later. Students often watch the “captures” to review concepts they may not have fully understood during class while doing homework or studying for an exam. The system is automated, only requiring the instructor to turn on a microphone for each class. Any annotations made using the Sympodium display and/or document camera are recorded so that students can see equations or problem sets build during the capture playback.
WPI faculty who have used lecture capturing in the past report that classroom attendance is not impacted. In fact, in surveys* conducted in lecture capturing classrooms, students also report that having access to the captures has little or no impact on their attendance. (Read: there may be students who still miss class, but both WPI faculty and students have confirmed that the technology does not impact the overall class attendance each day compared to the attendance before the technology was used.) In these surveys, conducted towards the end of each term in courses that use the technology, students report that they use captures for review, mostly while preparing for quizzes/exams or homework. Additionally, most students self-report that the captures have had a positive impact on their performance in the course, though the ATC has not been able to validate this because there are too many other variables that may have changed from one offering of the course to the next.
In addition to instructor audio and classroom video, Echo360 hardware-based classrooms can capture content sent to the projector from the podium. This includes the following content:
- podium computer
- Sympodium annotations
- laptop computer, connected through podium VGA cable
- document camera (not installed in all e-Classrooms)
Unfortunately – and we get this question a lot – chalk and/or whiteboard content cannot be captured with the technology. However, if you are interested in exploring the Sympodium display for annotations, please reach out to us at atc-ttc@wpi.edu! The Sympodium display, installed in all e-classrooms, allows you to mark up digitial content, and also record those annotations using the lecture capturing technology.
Additionally, this year as part of our license with the vendor, WPI has acquired Echo360’s Personal Capture (P-Cap) software. P-Cap is a desktop screen capturing software program (similar to Camtasia) that allows you to publish recordings to your myWPI site from your home or office computer. P-Cap would be a great resource for publishing ad-hoc lectures, follow-up discussions, etc. for asynchronous playback, with very little post-production work required (one of the “features” that is lacking with our Camtasia license). To learn more, visit this webpage, or contact the ATC at atc-ttc@wpi.edu!
To learn more about lecture capturing, or to sign up to have your course captured, visit this webpage: http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/Echo360/
*IRB approved