9 Questions You Must Ask Before You Start Lecture Capture

Hello.

Welcome to our continuing series of live webinars

documenting creative uses of Mediasite around the world.

I'm Sean Brown, vice president of education, and today's

webinar is entitled "Nine Questions You Must Ask Before

You Start Lecture Capture."

Once again, we have a lot of people joining us from all

around the world.

This is one of the largest pre-registrations we've ever

had for one of our events.

So I'm extremely excited about this.

I'm not going to go through everywhere, but as usual, I'm

very proud that we have universities and institutions

from every single state in the United States, and once again,

every single province in Canada has

been represented today.

We also have a significant number of people registered

and joining us live from educational institutions

around the world, including from India, England, Iran, New

Zealand, Spain, Norway, and France.

So welcome to you all.

Before we get started and I introduce my guest, there's

just a few housekeeping items I want to make sure you're

aware of to increase the usefulness of this broadcast.

If at any point in time you have a question--

and I'll be holding those questions until the end--

you can click in the interface on that which looks like a

speech bubble.

Looks like a dialog box in a cartoon.

You click on that button, and you'll be presented with a

text form in which you can type a question.

And I will receive it here in the studio and will relay it

to my guest during the Q&A interaction that we have

towards the end after he's made his prepared remarks.

In addition to that, you'll notice an icon that

looks like a link.

Behind this, you will find supplementary information

about my guest's presentation, including an ebook that he has

written relative to the topic of today's broadcast. So very

exciting information, including the slides that

he'll be using today for you to review.

So now I'd like to introduce my guest. I've known Duncan

McBogg for years.

He is an educational technologist at the University

of Colorado at Boulder.

At CU, he's responsible for classroom technology, design,

and end user documentation.

Before joining CU, Duncan was a staff engineer, trainer, and

multimedia specialist for CEAVCO Audio

Visual in Arvada, Colorado.

Duncan is a certified technology specialist and a

certified video conferencing engineer.

He holds a Master of Social Sciences degree from the

University of Colorado at Denver, and I couldn't be more

happy to have him here with us, in studio, in Madison, to

talk to all of you today.

So welcome.

Thank you, sir.

It's a pleasure Good seeing you.

Before we get to the webinar, I wanted to show you a brief

video asking me some questions about lecture capture.

So let's roll it.

[BEGIN VIDEO PLAYBACK]

It's very important to leverage your sales engineer

and your sales rep.

But be forewarned--

their passion for the technology is pretty intense,

so you may need to set some boundaries with them.

Jay.

Duncan, I just want to talk to you about the 5.4 release.

Do you have a minute?

How many times do we have to talk about this?

When working with automatic lecture capture, make sure

that you know if you're being recorded or not.

Otherwise you may say something that you

want to take back.

Recently, one of our Crestron programmers found that

out the hard way.

[SINGING]

Try to avoid a scene like this.

[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].

[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].

I'm sorry.

I don't understand what you're talking about.

I don't know what you mean.

Exactly.

[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Let me bring up my PowerPoint here so I can start the

presentation.

Thank you for joining me, everybody around the world.

I really appreciate your time, and it's an honor to be here

talking about Lecture Capture and trying to ask some

questions before you start this endeavour.

I just wanted to briefly talk about academic technology

support and the pilot that we conducted at CU Boulder.

We wanted to assess the

supportability of Lecture Capture.

Can we support it with our support model?

We have a distributed support model, and what that means is,

we have teachers call in to an IT service center if they have

a problem, and then a technician is dispatched to

the classroom to help out and to provide

service at that point.

So we needed to have no on-site operators.

So we needed to take advantage of the automation functions of

the Mediasite.

We also wanted to our their ability to really do this

ourselves without relying on AV consultants or AV

integrators.

And I think for the most part, it worked.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it all.

It's not easy.

We have to Crestron programmers that we use, and

they do a fantastic job, but the learning

curve is pretty intense.

So if you want to have your own in-house AMX or Crestron

programmers, just make sure that you know going in that

it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to be a lot of

investment in time, money, and personnel.

And of course we wanted to learn what the faculty and

students think of the technology, and

I'll show you, actually.

There's a link on this Mediasite webcast to the asset

program of the people who conducted the survey.

And I'm actually not going to talk about that, because I'm

kind of biased, to be honest with you.

So they did that themselves.

My design philosophy.

It's Gestalt AV. To me, the Mediasite is one of many

components, and they're all interconnected.

If one fails, do they all have to suffer?

And my answer to that is no.

And I'll be talking about that a little later.

And it's all faculty-focused.

If it's not focused on the faculty, you're going to ask

risk that the adoption is not going to happen.

You're going to really make it to where faculty aren't going

to want to be involved.

So without faculty, we have no teaching, no learning.

We want to avoid that at all costs.

And redundancy rules.

And I'm going to talk about this a little later.

I have a couple slides on it.

But in essence, the technology shouldn't rule teaching.

Teaching should continue if the technology doesn't work.

And of course that benefits everyone,

teachers and students.

So question number one.

How are you going to make Lecture Capture about faculty?

And as you saw in the video, if you kind of overwhelm the

faculty, if you're kind of starting out with, this a

question [? for the test panel, ?]

you can do this, this, this, and this, you're really kind

of missing the opportunity to talk about the basics of

teaching on a Crestron unit.

The basics of sending signals to the projectors, doing a

basic PowerPoint.

So that's where we want to start.

You obviously want to communicate with them.

Very important.

Even invite them to the table.

If you have some faculty who are interested in Lecture

Capture, invite them so they can come on board.

Observation.

When I was doing my master's work, I spent countless hours

in the classroom.

And that helped me determine if what I was designing was

actually working.

If it was being used, if so, how, if not,

what could I improve.

Outreach is crucial.

You want to address factors associated with Lecture

Capture, because there are quite a few of them.

And most of them are justified, if not all of them.

And the theme of this presentation is going to be

ease of use, and you'll see that throughout.

And this guy here, the professor, you know, he needs

to be focusing on splitting atoms, not

recording the lecture.

I'm going to bombard you with a lot of text here, and I know

that's kind of not a good rule of thumb when you're doing a

PowerPoint, but I think it's important.

Academics are academics for a reason.

They want the science behind things.

They want to know who else is doing it.

They want peer reviewed literature.

So give it to them.

I'm not going to run through all of these, but I just want

to have them up there as something that you

can take a look at.

And you don't need to do a master's

level literature review.

You need to have certain links available for faculty to go

to, that they can see what other universities are doing.

Again, ease of use.

If you haven't read Diffusion of Innovations, I highly

recommend it.

Everett Rogers.

Ease of use is critical for adoption.

Without it, you risk people not wanting to partake in the

technology, and then obviously they won't use it.

And according to Cooperstock, he says the same thing.

It really should be as easy to use as an overhead projector,

and I couldn't agree more.

So again, back to emphasize the basics first, then move on

to the lecture capture discussion.

Quick start guide.

What I want you to do, if you're new to the Mediasite

interface and the Silverlight player, is--

with this slide, it has kind of a lot going on.

So in the VGA window, or the computer window, there should

be a magnifying glass.

And if you need to, if you are having difficulty reading

this, you can click on the magnifying glass and zoom in

and out, and then that will turn to a hand, and then you

can move around the computer window and see kind of what

this graphic is displaying.

But of course, again, going back to, we want to have

faculty who may be having difficulty with this

technology, and then empower them so that even the basics

are taking care of.

Their mike turns on.

In this particular microphone, the power button is the same

as the mute button.

So you want to clarify that.

Same with this slide.

There's a lot going on here.

But we want to, again, empower the faculty to be

able to have success.

To be able to teach the way that they want to teach,

without having to worry about if the

technology's going to fail.

I'm going to leave this up there for a little while

longer so you can see it.

But again, use the zoom tool if you want to zoom in on it.

Some example of faculty outreach that we did was one

of our conferences in 2008 was called the Colorado Learning

and Teaching with Technology conference.

We set up two example touch panels that we created, and

one of the purposes of that-- obviously, there is faculty

outreach-- but the other one for us was getting our

Crestron programmers to start thinking about, what is this

going to look like?

What is the end user are going to feel when

they see these buttons?

And so it kind of served two purposes.

We got outreach and we got some experience with the

Crestron and GUI design, Graphical

User Interface design.

And this is the example of one of our kind of

consultant-driven touch panels.

And it's not bad by any means.

but when you're in a class, and you don't know-- it's your

first class and there's no directions whatsoever, you've

got students asking questions, I'm not going to be able to

make it to this class, I'm not going to be able to make it to

that class--

you really want to have something that's easy to use.

And the source destination model of hitting laptop,

projector, [? OX, ?]

laptop PIP, projector, you know, destination preview

video-- none of that really makes a lot of sense sometimes

unless you know what you're doing.

So again, back to empowering the faculty with ease of use

so they can teach their class without having to worry about

the technology.

This is an example of just a kind of a basic Crestron touch

panel layout we put together.

It's based on the task-centered or user-centered

philosophy.

What do you want to do?

And ultimately, we didn't end up going with

something like this.

But this gave us a good opportunity to

see what people preferred.

And also again, we reached out to them, and we wanted to know

what we could do to help them teach.

Our initial Crestron touch panel design, we

kept the same graphics.

But what we did, and lot of credit to my buddy Randy

[? Shoshada ?]

and William Shriner, who are our Crestron programmers.

We decided that instead of source destination and two

buttons to hit, what if we mirrored the sources, left,

right, so then you basically just hit one button?

And that became one button routing.

And then we have active feedback control, which, is

the projector on?

Is it off?

And one of the things that's not on this slide that I also

want to stress is giving end users exact time when the

projector is going to be on.

Giving them exact time when it's going to cool down.

So a status bar showing when that time's going to be.

And this button right here was a camera button.

We've since got away from that and gone to something a little

more intuitive.

But keep that in mind.

This is our Mediasite touch panel page.

If you were to hit the camera button, this is what

you would have seen.

We've since changed it, and I'll explain why.

The record input sources you can see that's computer one

and computer two.

They're green and red.

What happened was, you'd have a faculty member go into this

page, and they'd hit computer one to send to the Mediasite.

But then they'd look around and see computer

two on their screen.

So it could get kind of confusing.

We also added a pause button, which then would return to

Resume Record.

What I didn't want to have happen was we have this

Crestron module that does all this cool stuff with the

Mediasite, that you could type in information, or you could

stop, start, publish your content.

Again, to me that's not very easy.

That's not ease of use.

So we wanted to do was give the faculty an opportunity to

go offline and say something that they don't want to be

recorded, and then easily come back to that so they can start

the recording and go back to the presentation.

Another thing I wanted to experiment with, and I don't

know if it worked out very well at all, either, is this

idea of camera preset and in particular, this one called

Third Screen.

Recording chalkboard images and additional

screens like this--

it's a good idea, but in practice, and this is just my

opinion, it didn't really work all that well without

automatic camera tracking.

And I'll talk about automatic camera tracking in a second.

This is what we're currently using.

And, you know, jury's out on it as well.

But when I say confidence without the monitor, what

we're trying to do is let the faculty know what input

they're sending to the Mediasite and what input is

being shown on the screen behind them.

And the way we do that, without having a big

confidence monitor in the back of the class that some faculty

don't necessarily want to look at themselves teaching the

whole time, what we're doing is, the left projector is now,

whatever you're sending to it is being

recorded on the Mediasite.

So this serves two purposes.

One, it's still ease of use.

I'm sending computer one or computer two.

And whatever I'm sending to the left projector, as long as

the faculty know that, is what's being

recorded on the Mediasite.

And again, active control feedback here.

Instead of just saying--

actually, before, we didn't say anything.

But now we're saying, the recording is idle, and then

we're saying, it's going to be recording so that idle would

turn to record.

OK.

Now let's get to some more questions here.

Who can lead the initiative?

You don't need someone like me with an insane passion for

this stuff bordering on obsession, but you need

someone who can kind of take the lead on this.

And does that mean you need an internal champion?

Again, I don't think so.

I think student demand may be the champion in this case.

You get enough students wanting to participate, then

that might be all it takes.

You need to identify stakeholders and clearly

define roles and

responsibilities before you start.

Measuring success.

How are you going to hit the target?

What will success look like?

Are you going to conduct faculty

interviews, student surveys?

In my case, observation.

I got a lot out of observation.

Or something else.

Collaboration.

Collaboration is extremely important.

Without collaboration, this just is not successful at all,

on a number of levels.

We have something at CU Boulder called Academic

Technology Consultants.

And the Academic Technology Consultants were crucial in

the success of the pilot.

Because what happened was they would be the faculty-facing

technologists that made contact with the faculty.

They would talk to me and say, look, we've got a faculty

member interested in this, can you help them out?

And then I would take over from there.

But without them kind of making contact and kind of

assuring the faculty that yes, there is literature on this

stuff, giving them some best practices information on what

to wear, even, that's important.

And again, we're trying to empower

the faculty for success.

We have something, again, like I mentioned in the beginning

of the piece--

Arts and Sciences Support of Education Through Technology,

also known as ASSETT.

They conducted the student survey of the project.

And again, that kind of removed me, someone who was

working on a master's degree about the stuff, but who was

clearly biased on the topic.

You want to avoid that.

So try to get a third party involved in your research.

We are collaborating with more experienced users.

The Center for Advanced Engineering and Technology

Education, also known as CAETE.

We have a lot of acronyms at CU Boulder, like

many places, I'm sure.

And the Leeds School of Business, who have been doing

this for quite a while.

A lot longer than we have. They were extremely helpful

and continue to do so.

What came of this was a Lecture

Capture data share group.

So we all get together and we kind of share what we know.

Which is awesome.

Because without that, you're kind of in the dark.

That also spawned into a lecture capture support

community group, which again, we've only met once, but our

next meeting, we're going to talk about legal ramifications

of this stuff.

Intellectual property.

So we're trying to explore these things and helping each

other do so.

The technology.

It's important to decide whether you're going to be a

manual operation or an automatic operation or both.

And when I say manual, what I mean is, do you have a student

or staff member taking the Lecture Capture appliance over

to a class, setting up, recording, stopping, and then

publishing later, or is it automatic, where you can

automatically start, stop, and publish the content to your

hosted server?

So you just have to decide whether you have the personnel

for manual or if you don't have the personnel, maybe you

go to an automatic model.

Automatic model is, of course, more set up on

the back end of things.

You have to set up schedules for each of the classes.

But in my opinion, well worth it.

And you have to monitor those classes to make sure that they

start, stop, and publish to the server.

So there's a bit of a proactive

element involved as well.

Audio.

To me, audio is the most important part of the

technology.

Without audio, obviously the presentation is pretty much

dead in the water.

You can see someone, you can see their PowerPoint, but if

you don't hear them and it's not good audio, then it's kind

of a moot point.

And pun intended there.

Ceiling mikes, mike arrays, wireless mikes.

It's not on here, but digital signal processors.

You can kind of go from a very basic level to a pretty

automated, intense level with digital signal processors.

But it's just important to figure out what you want to do

and what your intention is.

What are the pros and cons.

In any case, the best practice is always to have faculty

repeat the question.

And of course, this is without Lecture Capture, it's just a

good practice in general.

What I found, though, with observation, is that once you

get in the moment of teaching and students are asking

questions, it becomes more difficult to do so

effectively.

So you may want to think about miking the audience.

Automatic camera tracking.

We're still working on the feasibility of automatic

camera tracking, but Temple University's Fox School of

Business has a really good demo on that.

There's a link also in this presentation.

Do you want to use a touch panel?

You don't necessarily need a touch panel.

If the faculty don't need a way to go offline, and you

don't need to give them control over that, then you

can automatically start, stop, and publish in a classroom

without a touch panel.

Hosting.

A big consideration.

Security.

One of the most important things is security.

I'm not going to necessarily talk about it too much, but

make a point to keep your content secure,

if you want it to.

Some schools don't.

Some do.

just ask the question.

Accessibility.

Same kind of thing.

Ask the question before you start, not after.

And one of the companies that Sonic Foundry in particular

works with and other companies as well is automatic sync

technologies, also linked in this presentation.

Support.

How are you going to support the technology?

Do you need a backup plan?

This is kind of where I get a little crazy with my

colleagues, and I'm always talking about redundancy and

spare recorders and what's our backup plan.

Because faster problem diagnosis equals

problem-solving.

Redundant systems. In event recording, this is kind of a

basic, and it could be common sense to some people.

But when you're recording onto a portable Mediasite, for

example, some people take the output of the camera directly

into the Mediasite.

If you have a camera that can record, just record

onto that as well.

So that way if you lose audio video on the Mediasite for

some reason, you can always go back and re-encode that from

your camera, and then just simply line up the slides from

the presentation, and you're not dead in the water.

Same with the DVD recorder.

And people.

People are the most important part of redundancy.

You train multiple people, make sure that everybody knows

where they're doing, and define roles and

responsibilities.

Classroom systems. I'm going to briefly talk about this.

Keep this graphic in mind.

ETS service only.

We used to be called

Educational Technology Support.

So what we did here, was we put a kind of redundant

computer audio interface and then built

that into the system.

So what that actually looks like is you have the laptop,

now it's going to an interface plate, going to some kind of

AV switcher controller, then sending that

output to the projector.

Well, if the AV switcher is out of, commission, are you

dead in the water?

My answer is no.

And obviously there's no arrows going to that to

illustrate that point.

And then in my redundant system, what I've done is make

the redundant interface plate go through a series of

distribution amplifiers and then go to computer two on the

projector so it's always plugged in, and all a

technician has to do is go with the remote and change

from computer one to computer two.

This is a simplified illustration, and if you want

more details, feel free to email me.

I have my contact information at the end of the

presentation.

But in essence, what the series of distribution

amplifiers on video and audio side, you can split those

signals to both the projector and Mediasite and still bypass

the out-of-commission controller.

And this doesn't happen a lot, but for me, it happens enough

to justify a redundant system.

Without redundant systems, the faculty are infuriated because

the technology doesn't work.

The students are waiting to get out of class.

They're bored.

And the technicians are either beating themselves up because

the technology didn't work or they're just frustrated.

With redundant systems, faculty teach, students are

eager to learn and they're ready to learn.

Their attention is not drawn elsewhere because the system's

not working and people are trying to figure out function

F8 or something like that.

And of course, the technicians popping wheelies in the quad.

So that's important.

Staff.

How are you going to support the technology?

Again, on-site staffing, no on-site operator, and how are

you going to train them?

Just things to think about.

And I recently found a quote here that I'm

not going to read.

But the quote basically says, in essence, that staff and

technicians are important.

And so you should utilize them and make sure that they're

trained accordingly.

Communication.

How will you share information, who is

responsible for communicating with the faculty.

Just something to think about before you start the project.

And nine.

Documentation testing and policy planning.

What are the university's policies on copyright and

intellectual property?

Do you have legal releases?

If not, you definitely need to look into that.

And the most important question of all is, what are

you not asking?

In my ebook, I lay out this stuff in a lot more detail.

But whatever you do, make sure that you ask the question, how

will this affect the end user?

And again, going back to ease of use, making sure that the

faculty are empowered.

How are you going to do that?

How are you going to accomplish that?

And hopefully this has shed some light on some of the

things you need to start thinking about

before you hit record.

And here's my contact information, like I mentioned.

And again, if you have any questions or comments for me,

I'd love to hear from you.

The phone is going to start ringing right now.

Yeah.

I do have a job, though, that I still need to keep doing.

But I am happy to share information, so.

That was excellent.

Thank you for those remarks.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

There's a lot of questions coming in for you, so it's OK

if I put you on the hot seat?

I'm on it.

All right.

Fantastic.

Well, great job.

I want to make sure that I mentioned--

because I didn't mention the title--

all of the guests that I'm lucky enough to have come join

me from our customer base, I'm very honored to have. But I

don't think any single individual has put more hours

into the presentation that you just heard and the

supplementary material than Duncan.

The ebook is called Successful Strategic Planning for Your

Lecture Capture Initiative.

And again, like I said, it's available for download as a

link right here.

And it's agnostic, because you can't make Duncan do anything.

It's great principles no matter where you end up with.

But we think the best choice is Mediasite.

Which brings me to my first hot question.

I don't know which one of us it's hotter for, you or me.

But a couple of people have asked, but one person in

particular asked, that they're trying to scale campus-wide,

and they want to make a campus-wide decision.

They think that appliance-based solutions are

inherently expensive if you're thinking campus-wide.

And yet you've come to a different conclusion.

He wants to know if you think software-based solutions are

the way forward, or if there's a particular reason you picked

an appliance-based solutions like Mediasite.

That's an excellent question.

First, software-based.

For example, Camtasia.

I love it.

So I'm here as a Lecture Capture advocate.

I'm not necessarily here promoting any one

solution or the other.

And the second part of the question, how do you decide?

It was important for us, because of our support model,

that we had an automated solution.

We looked at other automated solutions, and the Mediasite--

and they're good, too.

I'm not going to say that they're not.

But the Mediasite fit what we needed it to do with the

automation.

The automation needed to have RS232 control so it could talk

with the Crestron, and the software stuff just

doesn't have that.

You need to have a student or a technician or faculty member

start the presentation, set it up, figure out where to

publish to.

And even if that's somewhat automated, it's not as

automated as we wanted.

There were literally days that I would kind of go without

checking on this equipment and it worked.

So that's really--

to answer that question, software-based, I think that

it depends on the application.

Depends on what you're trying to achieve.

But in our case, automation was crucial, so we had to get

an automated solution.

So automation drove you towards appliance, which

matches our design--

Correct.

Where we were a software company back in 2000,

if I may jump in.

We researched and figured out that in order to deliver the

maximum amount of automation, that even in 2010, one needs a

built-in solution as the platform to integrate with the

other technologies.

So I'm glad we're on the same page there, at least.

Another person asked, with all your research, is there any

research showing the value that you covered of talking

heads or video of the faculty and student achievement versus

audio and content only?

So what are your thoughts about the role of video?

Is it just for fun?

Is it actually pedagogically useful?

What do you think?

That's a very good question.

I don't have it in my head right now.

The answer is yes, there are.

And my opinion is that the audio and the PowerPoint

slides are what's important.

And of course, you know, you want to be able to see the

facial expressions, you want to be able to see what kind of

experiments people are doing in the classroom.

So video is not unimportant.

But I think that the audio and the PowerPoint slides are the

most important.

So if you wanted to drop one of the three, the video would

be the one that I would drop in a situation where I had to.

Fantastic.

Another question is content management.

A friend, Tony, says, how are you handling content

management and serving using Mediasite?

Are you using Mediasite's inherent content management

with our catalogs and stuff, or he's asking, are you using

a third party on top of that?

That's a very good question.

The answer that I have to give you right

now is, it's ongoing.

I can't necessarily answer that question.

We just took this from a pilot project to an official project

with a different project manager.

but?

I can say that we started out by hosting with Sonic Foundry,

and that enabled us to kind of think about whether the

technology was even going to work for us before we invested

in the Mediasite EX server, which we have since done, and

authenticated with active directory.

But to be specific and kind of go through that, I can't.

We're still setting that up right now.

Maybe in a year or so, I can I tell you about that.

But it's a good question.

I would look to other people who have been doing this a lot

longer than we have for the answer to that question.

Another question for me.

I must have talked too long.

The the name of the ebook is Successful Strategic Planning

for Your Lecture Capture Initiative.

And actually in the interface by the video where you're

watching us now, there are things that look like two

chains of a link joined together.

If you click on that, that's where you'll find Duncan's

slides and the ebook itself available for you to download.

And then there will be other links about where to get it in

the future.

Once you start selling it in hardcover,

and then the movie--

OK.

Enough.

I'll stick with a video in the beginning.

[? I'll let it go ?]

for now.

All right.

Fantastic.

Another question is about integration.

A couple of different people have picked up on the fact

that you talked about Crestron slash AMX RS232 integration,

and I know in your previous life, when you were in a

corporation, you know how to do that stuff.

The two questions that I'm getting the most over here are

one, how hard is Crestron or AMX programming to do, and did

it cost a lot to get it done?

And two, what's the role of it?

Is it really important?

One, very hard.

It shouldn't be taken lightly.

This is not something to where a technician can kind of be a

Crestron programmer on the side.

This is something that you need to invest in.

It's not something you pick up for the project.

Oh, we're doing Lecture Capture.

We're thinking about doing room control.

Somebody go download some PDFs and get up to speed.

You want to hire a professional, just like you

would for C++ C# or Visual Basic.

Exactly, exactly.

And in fact, for some people, it's a lifestyle.

My buddy Billy, one of our Crestron programmers, has it

in his house.

So it's not something to be taken lightly.

And the second part of the question--

was it beneficial?

Yes.

I think it even adding just a pause button onto this

interface was beneficial.

Because the most important thing you want to do is give

your faculty control over their persona.

And giving them and empowering them to say, look, I don't

want to say this right now on camera.

I want to make sure that I'm not.

Oh, OK.

It said Record before, now it says Pause.

OK.

I'm going to speak freely and then go back to my lecture

when I feel like it.

So even just adding a pause button--

I think it was well worth it.

Did I answer the question?

I think you hit it, I think you hit it.

So do you make your decision about how automated the class

should be based on simplicity?

Is it for simplicity's sake?

It's a combination of both.

I mean, we're trying to take two roads here.

We want to keep everything simple.

But let's just say in the future that we wanted more

functionality on the Crestron.

We want to have our Crestron programmers be able to deliver

that if it's the faculty demand.

So you want to know enough to keep it simple, but you also

want to eventually know enough to make it

more robust as well.

That completely makes sense.

I'm going to sneak in a follow-up question from Tony,

the content management questioner, one of them.

Are you planning to integrate with a course management

system like Blackboard?

So can you touch again how Mediasite, in its

presentations and catalogs, integrate with your CMF, if at

all, in your example?

The answer is yes, I believe we're planning on doing that.

But you know, I'm really not an expert on that, and until I

am, I don't really want to speak about it.

So you provide the links to the

faculty and you're flexible.

You're like, look.

You've got your recorded classes in your links and you

can embed them in the CMS if you want.

You can send them directly if you want.

And then what the standard is going to be is still an open

question for that contact group you talked about.

What's the task force called that talked about Lecture

Capture together?

It's called the Lecture Capture

Support Community Group.

OK.

It won't be real [? SCU ?]

until it has a nickname like CAETE, [INAUDIBLE].

That's right.

There's a lot better resources on kind of AD integration and

Blackboard integration that are going to give you much

better answers than what I can provide at this juncture.

Cool.

Another person asked, people are wondering whether to look

at services in the cloud, a hosted solution, or to run the

software in their data center on campus?

You said you did both.

And you and I met--

or you started off piloting, and then

hosting, and all that.

What did you learn, and what security things did you have

to have in mind or address for your faculty to be

comfortable?

That's good.

Good question.

The first is, eventually our goal is to have all of the

content that we have on campus integrated into a content

delivery network.

So a single portal, if you will, that will allow people

to access content from YouTube, iTunes U, the

Mediasite, other Lecture Capture appliances,

software-based Lecture Capture.

So we want to eventually have one portal for all of that.

Security-wise, we started out with Sonic Foundry hosting,

like I mentioned, and that wasn't integrated into our

active directory.

So what I did was I made generic usernames and

passwords for each course catalog, and then I gave the

professor an admin username and password to where they had

control over their catalog and they could edit things in

their catalog so they had control over their persona.

But it wasn't as secure is it could be, and it wasn't

unsecure in the sense that everybody had access to it.

But you really want to make it as secure as possible and keep

control over your content.

Or maybe you don't.

I mean, I'm throwing it out there as a question.

But like I said, eventually we want to have one central

portal or one content delivery network for all of this video

content on our campus.

Well said.

And as a note, you were doing it in a pilot phase.

But our hosted customers who choose to use us instead of

their own data center, you can integrate your active

directory with our hosted services, like you can if it's

on promises.

But that's great.

Another person that asked--

specifically, you had mentioned the different types

of classes that go in your classroom, asked, how does

Mediasite and the preset camera views that you have

worked for capturing faculty who teach a writing-intensive

course like on an annotator such as chemistry or math,

where they have to write out equations

during the live lecture?

What's your opinion?

What's your best strategy for that?

In short, I would say in general that it doesn't.

This is really technology meant to capture PowerPoint,

audio, and video.

We tried, we met with one physics professor in

particular who was really gung ho about the camera presets,

and he used it a lot.

He went to the camera preset page, selected Left Chalk, and

started writing.

And then he had to go back to the touch panel, select Center

Chalk, and then go back to the chalkboard.

So if we had automatic camera tracking, obviously he

wouldn't have to go back to the touch panel and do that.

So the jury's still out for me on that.

I think the way we did it I don't think

worked all that well.

I think I'd have to ask the physics professor again if

he'd use it.

But you know, I think that you really need to do some kind of

automatic camera tracking system, and again, back to

ease of use, making it easy for them so he's not teaching

his class and writing great stuff on the chalkboard, than

having to mentally switch off and say, well, I need to go

back to this touch panel thing, go to my other present,

make sure that I'm recording that.

You know?

So it just gets complicated.

But it sounds like-- and I see people all over the world, not

the depths that you've researched, but in people's

installations, it sounds like independent of Lecture

Capture, right or wrong, it just seems to be that Lecture

Capture is another force that kind of pushes people towards

using electronic annotation, whether

it should or shouldn't.

Even though they have the option of the cameras.

But maybe that autotracking can keep the chalk alive a

little longer.

Yeah, I would research the Fox School of Business, the Temple

University piece.

Which is in the links.

They do a really good job of that.

And like I said, the jury's still out for me with it on

the touch panel.

I just don't like it, to be honest with you.

It interferes with teaching, as far as I'm concerned.

It was a good experiment, but I think that we got our

answer, and I just don't like it.

With the time we have left, I'm going to consolidate a

couple of other questions.

One question--

well, this one's unique.

But I know you have an opinion on it.

And this is a question that's asked to me a lot, about the

expense of a room.

Brian feels that lighting is also very important to make

sure your camera images encode better and everything else in

the room, including chalkboards, look better.

What you guys do and what do you personally believe about

the role of lighting in a video?

I was a gaffer.

I owned a lighting and grip truck for a couple years, and

lighting is everything to paint a picture.

So--

Is it realistic, though, in a classroom environment, in the

recession and budgets, can you build a room that's

well-lit for video?

I think if you have the right people and you have the right

questions that you're asking about, positioning and that

kind of thing, it can be done.

But I couldn't agree more.

I think lighting is really important.

And in fact, that should probably be one of the

questions that is added to this presentation.

Because it was overlooked on my part,

but it is very important.

But can it be done?

I think so.

I think that there's a lot of great lights out there, and a

lot of great people who can design them.

And so yeah.

Lighting is extremely important though.

OK.

There's still a bunch of more people in this lightning round

who just basically asked how you deal with that camera

switching for more than five frames per second.

So you started this presentation with the video.

What is your best way that you've made the faculty be

able to do this in your ease of use mantra?

I've got a video to play.

I've got something that--

what have you been doing?

We haven't answered that question, to

be honest with you.

It's a very important question.

There's a lot of complications.

Because now you've got--

people are showing YouTube most of the time in class, and

you set your VGA window for fast motion, or do you switch

back and forth?

In our model, we couldn't afford to have somebody be in

every class to make those decisions.

So to be perfectly frank with you, it's still ongoing.

We're still something that we need to

discover for ourselves.

But you need to ask the question for sure.

So these will be yes-no questions as we finish up.

Do you think Lecture Capture improves grades?

Oh, thank you for the segue.

My conclusion for this presentation was going to be

the reason that I love it so much, and the reason I'm such

a passionate advocate for Lecture Capture, is that it

would have helped me as a student.

In fact, when I started my master's defense, I had a

whole bunch of slides, they were nothing but text, I was

very awkward in my speech, I would say filler

words all the time.

Then I went back and I did something called reflective

processing.

I'd watch the videos and then say, well, I don't want to do

that again, and I definitely don't want to say that word.

And so it helped.

So yes.

A resounding yes.

Because it works for me.

Great.

Last two questions and then we're done.

A person asks, they use of Camtasia successfully and post

files to iTunes today.

Most of their colleagues aren't there yet.

To what extent would this system be easier

for them, if at all?

I don't think it would be easier.

It may, when you get to that automated kind of

functionality.

But until you get to the automated functionality, I

think that you should just kind of take smaller steps to

get to this.

But it might be easier for their colleagues?

It may be, yeah.

Just scared to start?

Yeah.

I'd need some more specific detail on that.

But I think that the bottom line is, the best way to get

to know this technology is to start using it, and pilot it,

and whether it's software, hardware, you know, when you

do it, you're going to find out what those questions need

to be, and move on from there.

And the final question is, will you share your research?

And I think you already have, in both your book and other

things, but there's a lot of people who ask, will you share

your research?

I'm here because I don't want people to make the same

mistakes I made.

So I'm happy to share.

Excellent.

Well, you heard it on the air.

So thank you so much, Duncan, for your comments and your Q&A

and all the great resources.

I'd like to thank the Mediasite Event Services for

producing this webcast for us, and I'd like to most of all

thank all of you for joining us for this continuing live

series webinars ours on creative uses of Mediasite

around the world.

We'll see you the next time.