Well, the successful system really falls into two areas of operation. 1. How people interact with the service you provide. 2. The technical infrastructure.
I think we have 1 down pretty well. We created a system that doesn't need any training to use, appears to have near zero impact on the theatre environment, operates uniformly across all locations and doesn't require the academic producing the content to press any buttons, log into web pages (in the theatre) or go on a training course. The people side of things runs so smoothly that quite a few of the teaching staff don't even check on their recordings. They just trust that they'll turn up unless they hear otherwise from their students. Hard to imagine, but one of most popular academics had 16,300 downloads in semester 1 and didn't review a single one of them. The system is generally word of mouth recommended between academics "as you don't have to do anything", a big win for us. 2, the technical side is more of a challenge as we're using podcast producer 2. Our system is download only, doesn't stream, has a centralised non-cached calendar, no calendar web UI, bottle necks, single points of failure, manual RSS feed creation, no editing (not even in and out points), weak capture agent management, weak capture agent design, many locally generated script and application work-arounds, basic authentication, no LMS integration, I could go on but you get the idea. Some of these could be over come with a time and money but I suspect we'd be buying into an expiring platform with a massive list of critical shortcomings. Fundamentally what we're after is a relatively simple system, we're not even interested in capturing in theatre video right now, just what comes out of the projector and microphones. However I suspect that to keep the successful outcomes from part 1, we'll need a flexible system that we can customise to our environment. When I spent some time with a few of the big names in lecture capture recently, you'd be surprised by how many of them couldn't offer me a system free of user initiation at the point of service (i.e. the lecture theatre). The few that could were very expensive and had hardware solutions that didn't fit in with our teaching environment. Stuart Phillipson | Digital Media Projects Coordinator Room 1.83 Simon Building University of Manchester Brunswick Street Manchester M13 9PL United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected] Phone: 016130 60478 On 10 May 2012, at 13:35, Dr Leslaw Zieleznik wrote: > > Stuart, > > I have read your report with great interest :) > > And I just wonder now, why your university is looking for a new system once > you already have a such good system in place? > > Les > > > On May 8, 2012, at 10:50 AM, Stuart Phillipson wrote: > >> Hi All, >> >> At the last unconference in Oxford I did a quick talk on some interesting >> data I'd gathered that seems to indicate a trend of increased examination >> performance (vs previous years) in a unit that made recorded lectures >> available for revision. If you're interested in this and didn't attend have >> a look at the "Learning Outcomes" video on this page: >> >> http://opencast.org/video/opencast-matterhorn-2012-unconference-recordings >> >> There's also some further detail here: >> http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/bestpractice/awards/~/media/Files/members/awards/excellence/2011/Manchester.ashx >> >> Anyway, I embarked on a larger study to see if the trend could be >> demonstrated on a larger scale and I said I'd post to the list when I had >> some initial findings. In short, although some units did show a trend of >> increased performance, others did not. There's still a fair bit of data >> analysis to do, basically a few paired t-test (across lecture capture and >> non-lecture capture units using the same cohort) with unequal sample size >> and unequal variance is required, but the system has quite a lot of noise in >> it. This is mainly due to changes in staff, LMS and other factors that could >> account for the variation in results. In addition, the selection criteria of >> the larger scale test led to teaching staff volunteering whose teaching >> standards were already excellent and this likely made any impact of lecture >> capture more difficult to measure. >> >> I'll post again once I've done the in-depth analysis, but it'll take me a >> little while to get that done. Based on this the next obvious question is >> what could be done next to investigate this further (in further >> investigation is warranted)? Ideally a single blind control group experiment >> on a unit or set of units would produce a more conclusive answer. However I >> doubt this would be ethical. I can't imagine the practicalities of dividing >> a class in half and then telling them only 50% of students would receive >> lecture recordings. Even if it were done in all likelihood the group >> receiving recorded lectures would share them with the control group. An >> alternative would be to target a set of units that showed low variation >> across an extended period of time, then measure short term / long term >> changes with the addition of lecture capture. It might be a bit tricky to >> resource this option, so it's probably more appealing if it were an activity >> done within a larger project to rollout lecture capture. >> >> Sorry for the wall of text, but hopefully that's interesting to some of you. >> >> Best Regards >> >> >> >> Stuart Phillipson | Digital Media Projects Coordinator >> >> Room 1.83 Simon Building >> University of Manchester >> Brunswick Street >> Manchester >> M13 9PL >> United Kingdom >> >> e-mail: [email protected] >> Phone: 016130 60478 >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Community mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/community >> >> >> To unsubscribe please email >> [email protected] >> _______________________________________________ > > ====================== > Dr Leslaw Zieleznik > OBIS (Oxford Brookes Information Solutions) > Oxford Brookes University > Headington > Oxford OX3 0BP > ______________________ > [email protected] > Tel: +44 (0)1865 483973 > Fax: +44 (0)1865 483073 > ====================== > > _______________________________________________ > Community mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/community > > > To unsubscribe please email > [email protected] > _______________________________________________
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