Lecture Capture Contingency Planning

Instructors at WPI are being asked to be agile in order to accommodate students who may not be able to attend in-classroom lectures.

If you’re an instructor who is not accustomed to lecture capture, this blog post will guide help you initiate a lecture stream using Echo360 or Zoom.

Echo360
Zoom
Planning

 

  • Echo360

At WPI, all classrooms are outfitted with Echo360 lecture capture capabilities. This means, at the very minimum, you can click on the Echo360 shortcut on the podium desktop, log-in, and start recording.

 

Because you’ve logged in to the Echo360 system, Echo360 knows who you are. The lecture capture will appear in your Echo360 library. You can then share it with students.

But to do more than the very minimum, you can add some metadata to the lecture before you start recording. This will enable you to find the lecture a few hours later when you get back to your office computer and want to post it to your Canvas site.

Here’s how you create that metadata.

Once you’ve logged into the interface, there’s a field on the top left: “Edit capture details”. Click on it.

 

Echo360 UI

Here, you can indicate the name of your lecture, how long you want to capture for and also whether to publish to your Echo360 library or a particular course section in addition to your library. (It will go to both places, in that case. If you find your course section in the drop down list and choose it, the live stream and recording will be accessible via the Echo360 button on the left side of your Canvas course site.) Check off the box if you want to live stream.

 

Echo360 Edit Capture Details

Save the details.

Once you get back to the main window, click the red button in the center to start the capture.

 

  • Zoom

Academic year 2020-2021 saw a large scale adoption of Zoom for the WPI community.

In addition to using Zoom at home or in your office, you can also use Zoom in WPI classrooms. Each Zoom capable classroom is equipped with a ceiling camera, as pictured below, or a Logitech Meetup camera that sits on the podium desk. You can launch Zoom from the Zoom shortcut on the podium computer.

 

 

More details on the built-in cameras/microphones in Zoom classrooms is available here. If you are in a Logitech MeetUp classroom, you can find those instructions here.

If you record to the Zoom cloud, you can directly link to the recorded video on the Zoom cloud or you can pipe your Zoom recordings into Echo360, where they can be accessed when students click the Echo360 button on the left side menu of Canvas. You can read more about the Zoom -> Echo360 connection here.

  • Planning

Which system are you more comfortable with? Once you figure out if you’re going to use Zoom or Echo360, you can make last-minute recording easier through some planning.

For example, if you are comfortable with Echo360, you can set up automatic lecture capture and record every class even before you know you’re going to need it. Below is the link to the request form to opt-in.

 

http://www.wpi.edu/+echorequest

 

You don’t have to share those videos with everyone; you can make them available to individuals on an as-needed basis.

To prepare for last minute lecture captures with Zoom, you could set up a recurring meeting specifically for your class. The recurring meeting could have no fixed time and be set to automatically record to the cloud. That way you’d have the meeting URL to share with the student in advance.

If you need any help with lecture capture contingency planning, please contact the Technology for Teaching and Learning group at WPI.

atc-ttl@wpi.edu