Hello, thank you for inviting me to speak in this podcast.
My name is Jan-T
Clausen, I am currently working as a scientific assistant at the ADCET Media and Competence
Centre.
I will speak about lecture recording and distribution at the University of Hamburg.
Unfortunately the podcast university conference in Osnaburg was cancelled, so we decided to
record my lecture.
Our project for lecture recording was started three years ago by Martin Krishard, when Professor
Rolf Schulmeister asked him to record the GMV conference in 2007.
Later my colleague Javel Sturm and myself joined his team.
So we are now three people responsible for lecture recording at the University of Hamburg.
I take my lecture to go, please.
What is common with coffee becomes a big challenge with lectures at the University.
In any case the interest of the students is quite justified.
Hence the University of Hamburg offers a steadily growing portion of its lectures online and
similar to a take away.
In my lecture I will present our project so called lecture to go.
Lecture to go is the name for both the recording system and the website.
I will talk about the special challenges of our project, its effects, aims and demands
will be discussed within the scope of education and research at the University of Hamburg.
The further topics of my talk are the different user scenarios, technical and juridical issues
as well as requirements in content and structure.
From the lecture hall to the worldwide web I decided to give you a basic rundown about
our situation at the University of Hamburg and the way our lectures are taken from the
hall to the web.
We have about 40,000 students and 4,000 scientists in 150 buildings at several places in the
city.
You can see this little map here in my presentation.
That is why we wanted a mobile and flexible recording system.
So after a period of time where one has to put all technical components together by himself
on the fly before he or she could begin with the recording we build this nice little suitcase.
Okay it's not that little but everything fits inside.
The lecture to go recording suitcase offers a complete recording of both the lecturer
and his or her presentation.
The presentation and the speaker's image are recorded on a macbook.
Because of the VGA to USB converter inside the suitcase there is no need for software
installation on the computer of the lecturer.
His computer is connected to the suitcase with a network cable.
The technology offers a long distance up to 100 meters between lecturer and recording
system.
So the distance depends on the camera and its zoom quality.
The camera is connected to the recording system by firewire.
Usually our little camcorder the Canon HV30 are positioned 10 meters in front of the lecturer.
High quality and sound is guaranteed by a wireless microphone connected to the camcorder.
The recordings are saved on small USB hard drives for easy data exchange.
Additional backup is possible on the V-Tape.
So after that I come to the next topic the workflow.
Four steps are required to prepare one's lectures for the World Wide Web.
First recording, second export or post-production, third is upload and the fourth is display
distribution.
The first step, recording, this is quite simple.
Open the record program on the macbook and you can add the different input sources by
this plus button you can see on the left side.
In our case the camera signal and the signal of the computer for presentation.
On the right side you can see an indicator displaying the level of your audio input,
the speakers voice.
With the info button you get a menu to give your file name.
These settings can be stored locally so next time you open the program you just press record
and your file will be recorded on the hard drive.
As you may imagine from my description of the suitcase it is a little bit more complicated
to install everything of the record system on site and to get everything connected in
the right way.
So now the question might be what's in the file?
Second step, export.
The two views are recorded in a QuickTime MOF container file.
This big file around 30 gigabytes per lecture can be exported into the common small H.264
MPAC4 files.
And a third screen with additional info about the lecture is added during this process.
As you can see on the picture the lecture is smaller than his presentation.
So everyone could read what's on the screen but sometimes it's better to keep the focus
on the lecture.
We are working on a solution that allows us to switch these parameters and present different
formats.
So you can see that here in my presentation.
Now we have these following formats.
To continue with my metaphor at the beginning in the future the user himself should decide
if he takes cappuccino or espresso.
Third step, the upload.
Producers or lecture recordings log in on our website.
I show you how this works.
I log in here and I click into my lectures, this new menu point here and I switch to
Eingarbo or input.
Here I select my lecture.
This is my lecture course and add information in Dublin Core Standard.
Then I switch to the list of my lectures and I click the upload button.
Here I can select my video and I have to wait a little more if this has to go on with
the upload.
Now I can decide whether I want open access and download.
I have to skip back to the list of my videos and then I can make the file accessible for
everyone or not.
There it is.
You can see it here in this little list.
Now we come to the fourth step of this workflow, the distribution.
This means the central media platform of the University of Hamburg.
Now we are already on our website for the distribution and the latest lectures are on
the start side but they represent a whole course.
There are several sessions.
You have to click inside here and then you see if uploaded lectures are online.
So we look for our lecture and there it is.
All you see here is the open access part of the recordings.
Other recordings are only available for students of the recorded course.
So I know there are a lot of things missed on our website right now.
Our website as well as the recording software is in beta status.
The following features are added soon.
We like to have these RSS feeds and block functionality for comments is web to zero
communication standards and many search functions should be added soon, categories for persons
and themes and I would love to have a little tech cloud where you can spontaneously look
for reasonable words and search after them.
We are also looking forward for implementing the advanced search possibilities like that
shown by Jörg Bartelonis from Uvisto.
Some of you might already know his site.
I think it's not my part here to describe this one but I invite you to visit his website
if you want to know more about this.
In the future it should also be possible that a producer of lecture recordings log in on
our website from the MacBook inside the lecture to go suitcase and the files should be recorded
on the server and should be exported by the power of our Mac pool inside of our computer
center at the University of Hamburg but that's the future.
Of course we are already interested in replay, matter on and the opencast community to push
these things forward step by step.
After telling you the basics of our lectures way from the hall to the web I come to the
most important part in lecture recording and distribution, the excess.
Let me start with the producer's excess.
At the moment we have 15 record systems to rent.
You can see my office here on the picture where the suitcases are put together and made
ready to rent.
Sometimes a little chaos here.
We have done nearly no promotion for our system because the request at the University
of Hamburg is high enough.
At the moment members of all faculties record selected events and lectures.
Usually student assistants make the recordings in agreement with their lecturer.
Besides every faculty has an e-learning office with several student assistants that support
professors who want their lecture being recorded.
So one main topic in all this lecture recording thing is the open access.
We aim for open access meaning that most recordings of university events should be accessible
for the public, for everyone and not only for chosen course members.
Here different rights have to be considered.
The copyright, the right of publication and the personal rights.
That's why lecturers have to sign an agreement that gives the University of Hamburg the non-exclusive
right of publication and guarantees the lecturer his copyright.
In addition the lecturer assures that he doesn't use copyright protected material, for example
in his presentation.
In practice we have often problem with that because the limits of citations are that clear.
And the use of images must be checked as the case arises.
This is a deep problem for open access.
Creative Commons licenses, like you can see that here on my presentation, there could
be a way out but even the videos on lecture to go aren't published under these licenses
because many lecturers have the feeling of losing control over their publication.
However, I think this field will be discussed on and on.
It becomes clear that copyright needs to be adjusted to the requirements of the digital age.
Another big issue is to make our content accessible for everyone regarding technical aspects.
The decision for media formats is always a compromise.
H.264 codec is really common at the moment and could be played on nearly every station.
So this decision was not that difficult.
But screen size and resolution had to be considered too.
We came to 960 whitties and 480 pixels high and at a data rate of about 300 kilobytes
per second.
This depends a little bit on the picture during the presentation and the camera.
But that's it.
The videos of 60 minutes have a size of about 120 megabytes.
That's much less than Apple's M4V files you can meet in their store.
Besides MP4 and M4V videos, we began to offer these small MP3s around 20 megabytes per lecture
and sometimes PDFs.
Then if the videos on our platform couldn't be displayed because of low bandwidth or missing
flash player, the download links and information about the lectures are displayed.
So a user with a minimum of technical access could get the information and download our
files.
Speaking about access, I come to the different user scenarios.
So I will talk about some experiences we made and I will add some results of an evaluation
made by the faculty of economics.
In general, we understand lecture to go as a service for blended learning.
So nobody wants to replace traditional teaching.
Lecture recording is an additional offer.
Students use these firms as preparation for tests and exams or to repeat the lecture.
Members of other courses or even other departments can get involved.
For example, a lecture in psychology was recorded because the course was limited to 20 users
from a special field of study.
So after recording, it was accessible for everyone.
And students can repeat lectures for better understanding.
Another issue is the access for handicapped persons.
We learned during this project that a wheelchair user couldn't get into one old lecture hall
at the campus.
And so we decided to record his lectures.
Of course, lecture recording makes mobile learning possible.
And one's learning at his own choice of time and place.
In addition, the multimedia publication of a lecture is an excellent scientific resource
for varied research and teaching.
For the University of Hamburg, lecture to go is a good thing for marketing the image
of the university.
We have also cooperation with schools, lectures for pupils who haven't decided whether to
study or not and what they are interested in.
And so they could watch these recordings and learn a little bit about stuff at the University.
Also there are research projects, for example, in the field of linguistics.
One actual discussed scenario at the University of Hamburg is to record lectures because of
building renovations.
Several lecture halls won't be accessible during a whole semester.
So in the last resort, lecture to go could be a way out.
It might not be the best way, but it is a way at last.
Let me speak about this evaluation from the faculty of economics.
Some interesting results came out.
About 200 course members were asked to answer several questions on a form and 85 percent
have used lecture to go.
Only a part of the students stayed away from the lecture hall because of the recordings.
But some missed lectures because of personal living conditions, recording the work or children
or something else.
And they were happy for the chance to repeat the missed lecture.
But I think it's most likely that some students decide to miss the lecture because of other
circumstances knowing that they could watch the videos later.
So we have to wait for more evaluations to answer these questions and think about students
missing the lectures because of recordings and so this blended learning thing should
really be the big issue here and not watching recordings instead of the traditional teachings.
However, most of the students would like every lecture to be recorded and they think it has
a positive effect on their learning.
To come to a conclusion, I'd like to end my talk with the words of Mastermind Marshall
McLuhan who said, the medium is the message.
According to lecture recording, this means regardless of what we are recording, lecture
to go itself as a medium is changing the university.
On the whole, we don't know yet what are the outcomes of projects like lecture to go.
So thank you for your attention.