Classroom Capture and the Community College CIO: Effects on Student Satisfaction, Performance and Retention

Hello.

And welcome back to our continuing series of live

webinars documenting creative use of

Mediasite around the world.

Today's webinar is entitled, "Classroom Capture in the

Community College CIO: Effects on Student Satisfaction,

Performance, and Retention.

I'm Sean Brown, Vice President of Education for Sonic

Foundry, and once again, we have a lot of people joining

us from all over the country, and all over the world.

In the interest of time, I'm not going to document

everybody, but I'm glad to say we have representation from

every province in Canada, all the states in the union, and

many countries.

I'd like to welcome you all.

Before we get started, I'd like to point out our

interactive features of the Mediasite player you're

watching me through right now.

Below me at the lower right, you'll notice a speech bubble.

That's the Ask button.

If you'd like to pose a question anytime during this

presentation, just click on the speech bubble and type

your question in.

We'll take your questions at the end of today's

presentation, and I'll relay them to the guests.

I'll be playing the role as the moderator.

I encourage you to provide your email address along with

your question, if you can.

That way, if we don't get to your question during today's

presentation, we can follow up with you directly after.

In the lower left hand corner is an Info button, where you

can get additional information about today's

webcast and the speaker.

You'll also find links to additional reference

materials, including the actual PowerPoint presentation

that my guest will be doing for you today.

it's chock full of data, so I'm really glad that he's

agreed to share that with you, and I'm sure you'll want a

copy of that.

So now, to introduce my guest. My friend Larry Schaaf, is the

CIO and Dean of Academic and Technology Services at North

Hennepin Community College, right in

Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Larry has followed a path similar to so many of his

current and former students.

Having started his education at the local junior college in

the Minneapolis area, Larry combined education, then work,

then more education for career advancement, an advanced

degree, and so on.

He currently holds his Masters.

In 1991, which he completed and made a career change,

entering the world of post secondary education and

teaching at North Hennepin Community College, after a

long career in the manufacturing services

industry, just like me.

Larry progressed from instructor to department dean,

and for the last three years has served as the college's

CIO and Dean of Academic and Technology Services.

So is my pleasure to welcome you back to Madison, to our

headquarters.

Welcome, Larry.

Thank you, Sean, thank you very much.

And welcome, everyone.

I think I've got some interesting information,

information you'll be interested in, I should say.

And I have a fair amount of it here, so I think I'll just go

ahead and get started.

Our initiative for classroom capture-- or lecture capture,

that we call classroom capture--

started back in a budgetary process, actually, in 2009.

We wanted to create a new environment, if

I can call it that.

A new way of helping with retention and completion of

students in their programs. We knew that two keys to that

retention and completion would be student satisfaction, and

of course, their academic performance.

We developed a system to help students deal with unexpected

life events that get in the way of their

success in the class.

Things like, I'm ill today, or my child is ill, or my job

shift switched and I can't go to class anymore.

Several of these kind of things, that are outside the

student's control, but have a serious impact on their

ability to keep up with class, or to stay in

a particular class.

So we wanted to focus on those, and see what we could

do to help with that.

We knew that we wanted to create a

technology based answer.

We knew that it would need to be flexible, to help students

deal with the schedule conflicts that they have in

their daily lives.

A big part of our decision was, of course, it needed to

be a system that was faculty friendly.

Meaning it met all the needs of the faculty, as well as was

easy to use, and didn't create a lot of

additional work for them.

And then mainly, we wanted something that was easy for

currently the IT department anyway, the academic services

department, to be able to manage the

system, whatever it was.

And that all led us do to select Mediasite for our

classroom capture project.

We liked it because it's live broadcast. We want to create

an environment that feels like the student

is actually in class.

Where they can see the faculty, see their expression,

pick up their body movements and their enthusiasm all that,

as well as seeing anything that they would see as if they

were sitting there.

PowerPoint presentations, document camera, as a faculty

member uses it, and so on.

We also wanted to make this a study tool.

Something that students could use to reflect, to go back in

and review their lesson from that day, or as they're

getting ready for a test. We think--

or at least I think-- it makes for a more

interactive student in class.

They focus less on taking notes that day, because they

know they can go back to the on demand part and watch that

video after the fact, so therefore they can participate

more in the activities of the day.

We really like, on the Mediasite tool, the indexing

of the video, too.

That really helps students focus in on a particular part.

If they got most of the lecture, but missed right

about in the middle, they can index through that, and just

watch the replay of that particular piece.

And then the scheduling and management tools are just

excellent for our folks in my department.

I really enjoy the simplicity of controlling all of this

classroom activity for our faculty.

We went through the process by holding regularly scheduled--

We had meetings once a month for about a year, 16 or 18

months, that had included faculty and staff people,

folks from our advising and counseling areas, folks from

the general population of the staff, and everyone was

brought into the discussion of what this really should be.

Faculty concerns really focused here on a few things.

One of those was, well, will the students just

stop coming to class?

They get value by being in class when they can, and I'm

afraid that they're just going to stop coming.

So we knew we wanted to try to deal with that in some way.

We also knew that--

faculty thought that, maybe they just won't do as well.

They'll stop coming to class, or they'll just try to watch

just the videos, the replays on demand, and they won't get

everything that was presented in class, and they

won't get it right.

So they won't do as well in their academic side.

Another concern was intellectual property, who

owns the video and who controls that?

And then security of that video.

How do we make sure that, if I say something wrong, because

this is being captured live, if I as an instructor say

something wrong, how do I know that it won't show up in

Facebook or on YouTube, and that sort of thing.

So we wanted to find systems and create an environment that

would deal with all these concerns, and yet continue to

create that lifelike experience for students.

We wound up with a dual system installation.

We started with installing all of this in three classrooms.

On the very back wall, look closely at the slide, you'll

see a clock.

And right next to that clock, you can see two cameras.

The two cameras are stacked one above the other.

One is a reference camera.

The other is a recording camera.

The reference camera follows the instructor back and forth

as they deliver their lecture.

As a former instructor, I was a pacer when I taught.

I couldn't have stood still at a lectern, at a podium.

So I knew that this would be important.

Again, we didn't want to have to tie folks, instructors, to

a particular location.

We wanted to give them that freedom to move about.

So this system allows the reference camera to track, and

then the recording camera to know where to record.

Exactly what the space in the front of the room.

In the front of the room, we added two focal points, two

predetermined focus spots for the cameras.

One is at the podium.

The closest one in this shot is the general podium.

Here the faculty has all the access to the DVD player, or

the internet, to the classroom computer, to the document

camera, and so on.

So a lot of their presentation, for most, or at

least, for many of the faculty, takes

place right from here.

In the far side of the room, you'll see another one of

these mats.

That spot is right where the piece of white board.

A lot of faculty like to write on the white board, rather

than using a document camera.

So we needed to leave space and be able to find a spot on

the white board, for that faculty person to be able to

write out their formulas, or message, whatever they needed

to write on the board.

So we wanted to make sure that we got a good focus on the

board, so that the camera captured that piece of

information.

Next, in order to get that real lifelike situation, we

wanted to make sure we picked up any discussion or questions

that students had.

So we installed button mics in the ceilings in each of these

rooms. There are four mics to control, to pick up all of the

questions that students might ask of the instructor.

That's good because the person at home, if someone stays at

home and watches it live, they get to hear that feedback or

the question, and the feedback from the faculty.

As well as, if they're going back and looking at this on

demand that night, or a week later, they still hear the

question that the student asked, as well as the answer

that the faculty gave.

If you'll notice in this picture here, you may not be

able to see it, but one thing we learned from this was that

when the ventilation system came on, it blew air over

these little microphones.

They're almost invisible.

And it would cause static to be picked up.

So the sound quality wasn't what we wanted it to be.

So one of my fellows on staff designed a little shield here,

it's a Plexiglas shield, so it's almost not visible, but

it does a great job of protecting that microphone

from the ventilation system.

So now we've solved the problem of not being able to

hear when the air conditioning or the heating is on.

To answer some of the questions about, how do I know

this isn't going to show up on YouTube, or Facebook, or

someplace I didn't want it to be.

We created a student release form.

Every student that's in a lecture captured class, or a

classroom captured class, is asked to sign this release.

Basically it's saying, you have the right to use my

voice, or occasionally my image, for the sole purpose of

the academic benefit of myself, and of the students in

this class, and for North Hennepin Community College,

and it won't be used for anything else.

It also says that they won't do anything with that copy

that they're not supposed to do.

Like load it onto Facebook or something.

So it protects the students, it protects the faculty

members as well.

We've run two semesters pilot.

Fall semester was our first pilot.

In that session, in the fall, we had 700 students in

classroom captured classes.

Eight faculty members from seven different disciplines

participated, and there were 22

different sections of classes.

All done in three Mediasite rooms. At the end of the

semester, we collected data.

We got data from 20 of the 22 sections.

Of the total 417 student responses.

In spring we had 29 sections from six different

disciplines, 15 faculty members, with approximately

900 students in that pilot.

We collected surveys--

we're still in process, actually,

of collecting surveys.

We've gotten from 18 of the 29 sections so far, and so far

we've received 308 student responses.

So what are the results?

What are the survey results?

One of the first questions we asked was, how did the use of

lecture capture impact your overall

satisfaction of that course?

You can see here that in the fall, we had 36% or so that

said somewhat--

Sorry, 55% that said somewhat, or significantly, impacted

their satisfaction positively.

In the spring, that percentage jumped by about

10% to about 65%.

So then we asked another question.

Based on your experience with lecture capture, would you

take another class using this format?

You can see here that a clear 64% said yes, they would.

Yet another 26%, 27, roughly, said they weren't sure.

And only 3% said no, they didn't think they would.

I think that the significance of the 26% is, since this

isn't offered in all disciplines, in all classes,

yet, I'm guessing that so many not sures came up, and that

they weren't sure if this would be offered in the

classes that they wanted to take.

So we took--

The last question on the survey was to ask the students

to give us their written feedback if they wanted.

We received hundreds of lines of feedback.

Here are some of the ones that I picked out that I thought

were pretty interesting, and related to their satisfaction.

"It was great because the time when I could not make it to

class, I just watched it online." Live, I

take that to mean.

"I watched every lecture capture.

It definitely helped me understand the material." So

that repetition that they get from the on demand part really

helps, at least this student.

Here's a really important one.

"It was really helpful for our DAS students, Disability

Access Students, because it recorded lectures so they

didn't need to themselves." So here we're helping students

with special needs through the Mediasite's tools.

And then the bottom one, "I loved it.

I wish all the classes had this option.

I would be able to revisit class and review any of my

notes while watching class again.

It's the best thing for study purposes." So I think those

are pretty powerful endorsements of the system's

success we've had so far.

So how did they use it?

How did it affect their grade?

Is our next focus.

The question was, how often during the semester did you

view recordings of class, in addition to

attending class in person?

And here you can see that not everybody used it.

We haven't gotten everybody to try, even though they're in

these classes, not everyone uses it.

On the right hand side, you'll see that 27% of

the students in fall--

sorry, spring, and 36% in the summer-- in the fall--

Let me try that again.

36% in the fall and 27% in the spring say they

never tried it at all.

They never did that at all.

They relied strictly on their classroom things.

But you can see the growth in the, from semester, from fall

to spring, and the number of people that are

using it more often.

That's what I want to take away from this slide.

People are getting the concept here, and they're learning how

to use this in a more effective way for them.

And then, the question was, how often did you view the

recordings instead of attending class?

Remember, we had faculty members who were concerned

that students would just not come to class.

And here you can see relatively small numbers said

they viewed the recordings instead of coming to class.

11% said most of the time or all of the time.

So a relatively small number.

If you look at the opposite end of the spectrum, you'll

see, for spring, only 49%, just under half, said they've

never used it, it's never influenced, they've never done

that at all.

So you can see here that most students continue to go to

class when they can, and take advantage of the live or on

demand options when they can't get to class.

If that makes sense.

Did that make sense?

Made sense to me.

And then, how often did you use the live streaming?

Meaning, tuned in live during a class.

And here again, the numbers are relatively identical to

the past set, as I guess I would have

expected them to be.

Not everybody uses the live streaming yet.

And that's telling me that they're still coming to class

on a regular basis, and only taking advantage of the live

streaming when they can't get there on their own.

So here's the important question then.

How did live streaming, or how did the availability of

recording or live streaming, affect your

attendance in class?

And here you'll see, fall semester, 70% said it had no

effect on their attendance in class at all.

They didn't stop coming.

OK.

And then, the big question.

How do you think lecture capture impacted your overall

grade for this course?

In the fall, 37% said it had somewhat or a significant

impact on their grade.

In the spring semester, that percentage jumps up to 49%.

Almost half the class, at least half the respondents in

that class, said it had an impact, a positive impact, on

their performance in the class.

And that's an awesome number.

Some additional comments that we've picked off.

"I watched every lecture capture.

It definitely helped me understand the material."

Here's an interesting one.

"I did not use lecture capture system.

But if I ever were to miss class in the future, it would

be cool to be able to go back and look." So here's somebody

who didn't take it, didn't need it, for

this particular class.

Didn't have to miss.

But who felt good about the fact that it was there

if they needed it.

And last one. "Very helpful.

A great resource.

I can't wait until all my classes have it." Perhaps the

most common feedback we got from students was, this should

be in all classes.

So how does it affect persistence and retention?

What we have now here, what you see here is-- in the first

two columns is our retention rate from fall of 2010 to

spring of 2011.

We haven't been in this business long enough to go

year to year, so we went fall to spring.

And you'll see that the blue line is our general

population.

Not necessarily--

students that were not in lecture capture classes.

And 71% of those that were with us in the fall came back

to us in the spring.

But that group that was in the lecture capture

classes, 77% came back.

And if you look at the course load that students take, you

see that of the general population, 36% take a full

time course load.

For us, we call that 12 credits or more.

36% for the general population, but over 55% of

students taking lecture capture

classes take a full load.

Again I think this is telling us that it helps students

study better, it helps students get to class more,

and they can handle the stress of not--

they don't experience the stress when they miss a class

and fall behind.

Some additional comments.

These are comments from the spring semester.

"I love lecture capture.

It provides flexibility for a busy schedule, or unseen

conflict without having to worry about missing out

covering a course content, or having it lower my grade." "I

think it was a great asset to any class.

I don't like to miss class, but there was a time when I

had to, and this was a great way to learn what the teacher

had gone over with the class that day that I missed." A

great endorsement.

The last one, "Lecture capture helped me to learn concepts

better from listening to it again, and again, and again."

Again, that's that on demand piece.

They can go back and relearn it and relearn

it and relearn it.

So what's next for us?

I should have updated this slide, I apologize.

I told you about the pilot that we ran this semester.

In the fall, we have two programs that are going to

fully adopt the classroom capture delivery system.

That is our accounting degree program,

and our nursing program.

Both of those programs now will offer all the courses in

their degrees using this technology.

We are starting to advertise that now, we think it's going

to be a marketing tool for us.

The nursing program and the accounting program are two of

those programs that students from previous classes said, I

wish I could see this in my accounting programs, or in my

biology programs, or in my math programs. And those are

the disciplines that really caught on, and are really

starting to adopt this in a big, big way.

OK.

So my contact information--

Did I go too fast?

That's OK.

My contact information at college is larry.schaaf-cla

ssroomcapture@no rthhennepincommu

nitycollege.edu.

Send me an email if you have questions if I don't get to

answer them today for you.

I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. And

thank you very much for your attention, and I hope you all

have a great day.

Well that's fantastic.

That's a very great presentation.

We're both from Minnesota, so you delivered it nicely, in a

friendly fashion, as people expect from

people from our state.

There's a ton of questions coming in, and so you can have

a sip of water, and then I'm going to put

you on the hot seat.

Whatever you throw up slides with data, that's when the

questions are really provoked.

And I know you're very granular and

precise with this data.

A lot of different questions came in but Jude asked it

best. She said, "In your survey, you seemed to have a

small response rate.

Was the survey distributed electronically or done in

class?"

The surveys were delivered in class.

So a teacher hands them out, because this is not in an

online environment now, so they collect them just like

they do their normal course evaluations.

Gotcha.

Just handed out right along with normal course

evaluations.

And was the response rate normal for what you--

Well, if you look at the numbers, we had-- and it's an

approximation--

I guess we probably had 900 students spring semester in

the lecture capture classes, and we had a third of those

that responded.

So it wasn't as good as the first semester, where we had

almost 50%--

sorry, more than 50%--

but spring semester just ended, so we're still

expecting more surveys.

Right.

Constrict the land.

That totally makes sense.

And just a minute on--

some people have questions about the size of the school.

I know you hit that in your first slide, but can you

characterize North Hennepin for everybody?

North Hennepin has about 10,000 students a year taking

credit classes.

We have--

It's a community college.

It's a two-year community college in a suburb of--

A metro area community college, right?

Exactly.

We have a very broad international student

population.

Well, I didn't tell you this, but we broadcast--

we used Mediasite to broadcast our graduation ceremony this

year, which was just awesome.

Through using Mediasite our international students who had

family or friends in other countries could watch the

graduation, because they couldn't get back here to

Minnesota to see it.

So a lot of people did that?

We had people viewing us from five different continents, six

different countries not counting the United States,

and I didn't count the number of states but a lot of people.

We had over 100 people tune in to the graduation.

That's great for your first time.

Or look at it in on demand.

That's great for your first time.

Very proud of that.

Cool.

Let's see if there were other survey questions.

One person asked a general question, "Based on the

positive student feedback that you've received so far, do you

plan to add lecture capture capability to other courses,"

which you kind of covered, but they want to know. "If so, how

will you prioritize which courses are

lecture enabled first?

Lecture capture enabled first?"

This fall--

over the summer, we are upgrading, or adding, building

out, I should say, two new classrooms. One in the science

building, and one in the nursing program.

So that's what we're doing next.

We also are about halfway through the construction of a

new building, and we'll be adding one or two classrooms

to that in the springtime.

So that'll be four, probably four, new lecture capture

classrooms by the end of next spring.

And the prioritization will go to those--

like the accounting program that I mentioned earlier that

has adopted this the delivery system for

their entire program--

they'll have first choice.

The nursing program will have first choice for theirs.

But from that point on, it's open to the public.

Anybody that wants to.

We invite all disciplines to come, and we've had a very--

a fairly broad spectrum of disciplines participate.

So it can be a faculty led initiative.

I couldn't be a marketing teacher in the business

program and say, gosh, I really want to have my courses

online for my students.

And come to you and start the process?

That's the way it works.

That's nice.

That dovetails into a couple questions that people had.

How did you get faculty on board, and were there any

obstacles to doing so?

We got faculty on board from the very beginning.

Not a large number of faculty, but they were always invited.

After that, the initial meeting where this idea came

out, we formed a committee.

Again, it included members of faculty, invited any faculty

that-- these meetings are always open, so anybody could

come to them.

We make sure that we had at least a couple of faculty

members though, who were interested in this new

technology, to be a part of the committee right from the

very beginning.

And then we just started showing--

Once we had a demo available, we started showing it around

at various department meetings and campus meetings.

And faculty members came to us almost,

saying, that looks great.

I'd really like to be able to provide these

services for my students.

That's great.

I think a question, kind of for me.

Roberta asks, "Is what we are seeing online right now,

including the slides, similar to what students would see in

the recorded lecture?"

I think that answer is yes.

Yeah, I think it's definitely yes.

We're the instructor.

You're seeing what we're showing the students

in class that day.

It's very much, very similar to that.

Except, like you said earlier, they're not restricted to

PowerPoint.

Now I bet that we could say about North Hennepin, and most

universities that I travel and see, and colleges around the

country and around the world, a lot of faculty are using

PowerPoint most the time, just like people do in business

communications.

It's a nice way to prepare in advance the hard points of

your lecture as a visual aid.

But it doesn't matter what you're doing.

If Larry went to a website right now, or like he said, in

his rooms, if they use some other parts of the facility

that are available to a teacher in the classroom,

Mediasite can capture it.

We like to say, if you can project it, we can capture it.

So it doesn't need to just be PowerPoint.

It can be anything.

There's a whole explosion of questions around one--

And I don't know if you're going to answer it or not.

But everybody wants to know, in various forms, two things.

How much did it cost per room?

And where did you get the money?

Did you rob a bank?

We didn't rob a bank.

We had support from the senior management of the campus right

from the start.

They bought into this concept really early on, so we were

able to find money for that.

The cost is a little bit challenging.

I don't know what I can say, and what I can't say relative

to Mediasite.

Costs.

I will tell you that there's really two parts to this.

There is the camera, and all the things that go along with

that, and then there is the recording and management piece

that comes with the Mediasite stuff.

The camera and all those pieces cost somewhere around

between $15,000 and $20,000 per room.

And then there's the Mediasite that you have to add to that.

And that's list price.

Who knows what you get based on various contracts that you

might be on.

And so that dovetails to a lot of questions that people had,

but I'll answer part of that question.

Which is, you're a hosted customer with us.

So one of the things that they're also doing, is we are

running the back end, the IT shop part of their streaming,

so it's a great partnership.

An option that more and more universities are using around

the country, in addition to having the Mediasite boxes

built into the classroom.

But as exciting as Mediasite is, a lot of questions, I

count like five to ten, are all

about your camera tracking.

So how many operators are being used to run the cameras?

How is it being done?

So if you want to describe to those people.

It's a nice setup.

We have zero camera operators.

I have two men on my staff who, one of them primarily

does all the scheduling of courses

that are to be captured.

So let me walk you through the process.

Let's say I was going to teach a marketing class this summer.

I would send a note to Joseph or Sam, the guys that work for

me, and say, I'd like to lecture capture my Business

100 class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from

8:00 to 9:00.

And they go ahead, and using the Mediasite controllers,

will schedule those events.

So when I walk into class that day, it's up and running.

It comes on when I ask it to, it goes off when I tell them

it's the end of my class period.

It's all done automatically.

So, other than my guy who schedules everything, there

are no camera people at all utilized.

Now, and you might want to go back to your picture of this,

but William Lund asks, "Are you limited to one camera

angle of the instructor?

Or is it multiple?

It is multiple.

With our two cameras--

Well, in a two camera system, one camera tracks the movement

of the instructor.

So as you look at this, I believe it's the lower camera

is the tracking camera.

And that moves back and forth, and it's a tilt pan camera.

So as the instructor moves left or right, primarily, it

follows them, and that gives a signal to the recording camera

to, follow along here, this is where you should be pointing.

So we can see them coming all the way

across, back and forth.

We do not take advantage of zooming in on the instructor

at this point.

If they walk into the audience a little bit, into their

class, it will tilt slightly for them.

But they could walk out of the view.

It is set up to capture, to track them, the whole width of

the front of the room.

That makes sense.

And then you have these pads on the bottom that control it?

Yes.

Again, the two pads are preset focus points.

So if the instructor walks over to the podium, the

closest pad to us here, and steps on it, the camera

automatically goes there.

If they know they're going to go write on their white board

on the other end of the classroom, they walk over, and

they step on that pad.

And the camera automatically goes there and focuses on the

board, more than on the instructor.

That's pretty neat.

OK, got it.

That that makes a lot of sense.

Hopefully that clears it up for people.

You have one of the growing percentage of classrooms that

are fully automatic in how the cameras operated.

And some just do a fixed shot like that gentleman is

thinking, you know, don't have any sort of automation.

And some have an actual operator, either locally in

the room, or a joystick, but obviously

that takes more personnel.

Which goes to another question, how many personnel

do you have who have to support that many

lectures going on.

Two people.

That's amazing.

They're awesome.

They are awesome guys, Joseph and Sam.

Another question that people have is, how many rooms do you

have currently enabled?

Three classrooms currently, with one portable unit, so if

we needed to set up a special event, we would be able to

capture that outside of our three rooms. Again, we're

adding two more over the summer, and we'll probably be

adding one or two more in the new building, once we get into

that in the spring.

Anita asks, are you able to track the attendance for those

students who attend the live session or access

the archived sessions?

Are you able to tell if they watched?

We can tell how often people watch.

The management reporting system does give us the

opportunity to say, how often people watched a given

presentation, class, how long they watched it, and so on.

Cool.

Another question is, how do the students access the video?

You use Desire2Learn, correct?

We do.

So, Desire2Learn is your content management system--

this person referred to Blackboard--

but, how do the students find their way to the lectures?

All of our classes have a D2L component attached to them.

So when an instructor is using the classroom

capture, they put--

within their D2L class, and here's part of our security

is, a student needs a username and password to get into their

D2L class, so that kind of limits who can get in to see

these videos.

But the instructor is given a link at the beginning of the

semester to a library for their classes.

And then, for each recording that--

the recording is placed by Mediasite, the management

piece, is placed into that library.

So the instructor doesn't even have to get involved with it

after that first initial link to their library in D2L.

From that point on, they don't have to touch it at all.

It just goes, it shows up there.

They are labeled by date, you know, the course title and

date. so it would be something like, Introduction to Business

1100 Section Seven.

Excellent.

Another person asks about live streaming.

They said, "I've heard that there are problems when

streaming live to large audiences.

Have you ever had any problems, and how do you

alleviate them?"

I'm not sure if I understand the question.

When you said streaming to a live audience, do you mean of

a live audience, or--

Going live.

He means going live versus on demand.

OK.

Then we've had--

we've run into some luck.

It's a bandwidth issue, and if folks at home are using

dial-up modems and that sort of thing, it just doesn't work

well for that.

But generally speaking, if someone has a high speed

connection, then DSL, cable, it all works very, very well.

Cool.

Another couple questions, but Susan asked it best. She said,

"You surveyed students, but how did the faculty like the

new Mediasite system?

Did you do a survey for them?

Was it easy for them to manage?"

Yes, we did do a survey of faculty.

The numbers so far has been relatively small.

We had, I think it was seven or eight in the fall, and six

in the spring, and some of those were duplicates.

So we don't have a large survey base of

questionnaires yet.

To answer the question though, do they

find it easy to manage?

Yes they do.

We've not had anybody come back to us after the fact and

say, this is just too hard for me to deal with.

All they need to do, really, is let us know what classes

they want to capture, and we take it over from there.

If they want to--

If someday they are having a test that day, and that's all

that's happening, then they don't want to record that day.

Well, they send us a note, and we unschedule it for that day,

but keep the rest of their schedule in place, so that it

starts back up again on their next regularly

scheduled class day.

Jack asks, "Microphone panelists.

Do the instructors need to wear a mic, or can the button

mic pick up the instructor?

Can you capture a panel discussion from

three or four panelists?

How does a faculty member edit out inappropriate content or

other items from the capture?" So that was like a bunch of

questions smashed together.

OK, let's go to the mic one first. We do ask faculty

members to wear a microphone, much like this

one, looks like this.

But a lot of them don't, frankly.

And the button mics do an outstanding job of picking up

their voice anyway.

So even if they forget to put it on, pardon me, which I've

been known to do, they walk in and just teach,

you still got it?

Absolutely.

And that's designed.

And I will have this disclaimer, if they are a very

soft spoken person, then it might not as well.

But it should always--

you can pick up people whispering in the classroom.

These button mics pick up people whispering.

So for the most part, even if they don't wear the mic, you

get a better quality if they do, but if they don't, we

still pick it up.

OK.

Let's see.

What was the other part of that question?

The other question was, do people, do faculty ever edit?

Or ask to edit if there's inappropriate content, or

whispering, that got caught during class?

Faculty can request my staff to edit.

Either Joseph or Sam will edit out.

But it's very basic kinds of editing at

this point, we don't--

And faculty can't do it.

We control that capability.

Happy to do it for them, but in an attempt to keep this as

simple as possible for faculty, we want to do that

work for them.

Maybe this answer asks that question.

"With nobody in a control room and all pre-set cameras, what

happens if a class runs long, past the time allotted?

Is it lost?

It is.

If the class ends at 9:10, I think we may run it an extra

two minutes or some small amount like that, but if it

goes much longer than a couple of minutes long, it will not

be captured.

But in the nature of that crowded college, when I've

been there, classes need to end nearly on time anyway.

There's massive shifting and room contention.

Exactly.

We have ten minutes between classes, and that's it.

Gotcha.

All right.

Sue asks, "What is the level of the current classes that

you've been capturing?

Are any of them remedial or developmental?"

None are remedial at this point.

It's all college level coursework.

Fair enough.

I think that would be a great place to

implement this, though.

I think it would be very helpful.

Gotcha.

And then Mitch, from Bemidji State in MnSCU asks, "What

resources influenced or assisted you in the design and

the layout for your classroom lecture capture?" Two smart

guys that work for you?

You know, we just, we started off with, let's think outside

the box for a little while, and come up with something

really new that, frankly, other schools aren't doing,

that we think might help students stay in class better.

And we started from that, and between Joseph and Sam, they

just started looking at various tools available, and

we went through a lot of different products, and wound

up with Mediasite being the best for the needs that we

have.

And some--

Thank you.

And very creative layouts that you're using, obviously, from

people asking.

Kathleen asked a survey question again.

She said, it's back to how many people were surveyed.

She says, if the surveys were given in class, would that

distort the results to people that only attended, unless

they were given during the final or something like that?

So just, more questions about, you seem to have really good

data showing how people felt about lecture capture, or, you

know, course capture.

How in the world did--

Was it a self selected group in any way?

How would you describe the survey?

Well, yeah.

The potential is there, I suppose.

We did not fashion it that way.

It's similar to the day we do an all levels survey, or the

day we do our classroom evaluations at

the end of the semester.

The students that are there complete it, the students that

aren't don't get to share their thoughts on it.

And that's the way we handled this one.

Great.

A couple more cost questions, and I'll get

you off the hot seat.

Matt asks, "Are new departments that you're

considering bringing on this year asked to help defer part

of the cost for installing the new equipment?" Now you have a

centralized budget, so that might not be the same as maybe

a University of Minnesota or something.

It's a budget issue.

It is centralized in the IT area, and under my control.

OK.

Got you.

So you work on the requests, like you said.

Whereas, we've seen some other universities that have a

decentralized budget do exactly what Matt suggested,

which is, if you are in the medical school and you want to

get to be a part of it, you might have to defray some of

the cost, at least for your classroom building.

But that's different from school to school.

In your case.

Mike asks, "Is it web stream only?

Do you choose to accommodate podcasting?"

We do not at this time.

You can, but you don't.

We can.

We haven't gone that route yet.

Again, because we're only a year into this, so we wanted

to make sure we had all the kinks worked out, to the best

of our ability, before we--

But that's definitely something we

intend to look at.

Great.

Dwayne asked, What do you do if a student refuses to sign

the release for a class?

Good question.

Haven't had too much problem with that so far, anyway.

The options that the teacher can give that person, of

course, are, if you sit in the back of the room, you won't be

caught on camera.

Because it only catches-- we set up a mask that only

captures the front of the room.

Now the first row of students might get the back of their

head captured, and so on.

So they can sit in the back of the room, and if they choose

to not participate, then that's their choice.

But we haven't really had a problem with that yet.

That I'm aware of, anyway.

Another two last quick questions, one will be

philosophical.

This one is about support.

"If there's a problem with the equipment during a class, how

fast are you expected to get over to the site to fix the

issue?" So what's the faculty expectation

right now with this?

Good question.

The faculty expectation is high.

It's always high on our campus.

And it should be.

Again, Joseph and Sam are the guys that are in charge of

taking care of most things that happen in the classroom,

and they've set the bar high for themselves.

So they get there just as quickly as they can.

Frankly, if something goes wrong during a class, most

often we don't know that until after the class is over.

You know, until the teacher goes to look at

the video or something.

As soon as we know, we get down there.

And if they want us to interrupt their class, they'll

be usually there within a few minutes.

Otherwise we wait until the end of the class period to go

in and fix whatever we need to fix.

What communication or marketing strategies do you

use to promote the fact that some courses are lecture

capture enabled, and is that impacting enrollment?

I know that was something you were excited about last year.

We are just getting started now with a marketing plan.

Working with our communications

department on that.

There has been a couple articles now.

Frankly, I'm doing this presentation, and I'm

presenting at Nisa next week.

And we are really starting to spread the word, now.

I think a lot of this will go word of mouth,

initially, for sure.

But we do have a marketing plan in the

works at this moment.

So we can't say that--

we haven't done a study.

Let me go back a step.

In fall, students didn't know that they were signing up for

classroom capturing classes.

We didn't indicate that in any way in the

registration process.

For spring, we did in fact do that.

Right in the title of the class, we indicated that it

was a lecture capture or classroom capture class, so

that they know what they're getting into.

And I haven't had the time to do that study yet, on how that

impacted enrollments for those classes.

Anecdotally, I kind of kept my eye on them, and they seemed

to be feeling very quickly.

So we think that it's going to be a great tool for us to

ensure strong enrollments in the classes are offered via

classroom capture.

Gail had a philosophical question, I'll just say it, I

think you agree.

But she said, why the emphasis on "lecture capture?" And our

firm named it, we named this release, because that's what

most people Google when they're looking at this kind

of technology.

But Gail said, "As we try to get away from pure lecturing

in higher education, the emphasis on capturing lectures

seems antithetical to this movement.

Might we focus on capturing learning, teaching, rather

than lecture?" Your thoughts.

My thoughts are, we are trying to back away from the term

lecture for that very reason.

We are trying to get everybody used to the term, classroom

capture, now, because we want to capture everything that

happens in that classroom.

And so do we.

It's not just the instructor teaching, but it's the

students' interactions with each other, with the

instructor.

And Mediasite's product gives us an opportunity to do that.

Great.

The last questions were all housekeeping.

One was like, what's the delay between when they record, and

when they're available to the students.

With Mediasite it's--

It's almost instantaneous.

Certainly within an hour.

Great.

And the last question I'll take was for me.

One gentleman commented, and this echoes some other people.

"This is great information.

Will this be available for viewing by others if I need to

have them view it later?

Where can I get a better idea as to the technical

set-up of the room?

Cameras, controllers, mics, et cetera." Well my guest, Larry,

has agreed.

Anybody who asked a question who included their email

address, he will continue to answer those questions

offline, so if you have any more technical questions that

you want to ask, like this one, just continue to fire

them in with the Ask button even when we go off the air,

which will be momentarily.

So with that, I would like to thank you so much for coming

all the way and doing such a great data-filled

presentation, and sharing your thoughts and your notes.

I'd like to thank Mediasite Independent Services for

producing another great webcast. I'd like to thank all

of you for joining us.

And we will see you the next time.