Lecture Capture is now available in all centrally timetabled teaching spaces, including enhanced rooms, upgraded through the hybrid project, and general teaching still on old room designs. This new service uses in-room equipment and the YuJa video management platform to capture, store and distribute recordings to My Dundee. Read on to learn more about the service, how to get started and where to go for support if needed.
You can read the initial project launch announcement here.
Key Information
- Lecture Capture has been deployed to all centrally timetabled teaching spaces.
- Detailed and quick guides have been created to help users get started (links below).
- Support will be shared between the project team and end-user-services. Simply dial *1 from the teaching room phone if you need help.
What is the Lecture Capture Service?
This service provides lecturers with the ability to record and publish their teaching activities from centrally timetabled teaching rooms. A lecturer uses the YuJa recording software, installed on all lectern computers, to record their audio and presentation that will be uploaded to YuJa platform ready to be published to your My Dundee module. Simple.
Here’s a quick outline of the roles and responsibilities for this service:
- Lecturers
- Students
- The Service
– Learn the workflow using the provided guides and/or attending the hands-on drop-ins.
Establish how you intend to employ lecture capture in your modules, including where recoding will be published and any ‘house-rules’, and communicate this clearly with your students.
– For each teaching activity to be recorded, follow the workflow appropriate to the room type to capture and save a video of the session.
– Be clear with students when recording starts and ends.
– Again following the workflow, ensure that the resulting recordings are published to your modules according to your module design so that your students can engage with them as intended.
– Take responsibility for ensuring that nothing inappropriate is published through this process such as sensitive conversations that may be captured in the course of your teaching session or copyright material.
– Be aware of how lecture capture will be employed in each module, including any ‘house-rules’ for recorded sessions.
– Familiarise yourself with where recordings will be published with you My Dundee module areas.
– Equip and maintain all centrally timetabled teaching spaces to be able to capture and upload recordings of teaching activities.
– Coordinate with central UoDIT teams to provide front line support to lecturers and minimise disruption to teaching activities should anything go wrong.
– Provide guides and training to lecturers so they can use the service efficiently and effectively.
– Work to improve the service over time, minimising effort, increasing reliability and developing new room capabilities to support the needs of the learning and teaching community.
A key challenge for implementing Lecture Capture for this academic year is that we are operating with a mixed estate of recently upgraded enhanced hybrid spaces and the un-upgraded standard rooms, still on the assortment of old designs. We have tried to design the workflow to be similar in both room types, however there will be differences in both usage and quality between these rooms.
Getting Started
Enhanced Teaching Spaces are characterised by their ability to support hybrid modes of teaching. They have advanced cameras, ceiling mounted microphones, lapel microphones, dual monitors and advanced touch-screen control panels (referred to as Dual-Mode design). This guide is for enhanced spaces.
Standard Teaching Spaces, in contrast, have comparably simple microphones and cameras and still have the old button-based controls. These rooms support regular lecture capture and you can find instructions for these spaces in the standard teaching spaces guide.
Support
Things will inevitably break, people will get lost when trying to follow the workflow. These things happen.
If you need immediate help with lecture capture, or any other AV issue, while trying to teaching your class – dial *1 using the in-room phones.
If you need general help outside of the classroom, such as questions about the service, or to report and issue after the class has finished, use Help4u
This year, we will again be providing in-room support combining resource from the project team and end-user-services. Additionally, UoDIT has recruited a number of student helpers who may turn up at your door to answer a call for support.
Note that the formation of the new Digital and Technology Service directorate will bring the formation of a new AV team, focused on developing and supporting teaching spaces in the future. Until then, we are coordinated existing resources to provide the best possible support for the new academic year.
Service Expectations
We are confident that we have deployed a lecture capture service that is easy to use, stable and will deliver lecture recordings to students as required. However, it’s important that users are aware of some limitations around the service being offered for 22/23:
- Lecture Capture is intended as a secondary teaching resource for learning reinforcement and in some circumstances as a backup to the actual teaching event – it is not intended as an alternative to the live teaching event. As such, expectations for the quality of the recordings should be set accordingly:
- Audio should be clear enough to understand, but don’t expect podcast quality. Quality will vary, with enhanced hybrid rooms producing the best recoding quality.
- Presentations recorded from the computer screen will be clear and rich because of the direct digital capture. Analogue presentations such as whiteboards can only be captured if you are able to use one of the in-room cameras to angle correctly. Again, results will vary.
- In-room cameras in Lecture Capture are only intended as a supplementarity source. The primary sources in this service is the audio and the screen capture.
- Lecture Capture is not Hybrid. Unless you are running a specific hybrid session in one of the enhanced rooms, Lecture Capture is only intended to create a record of the live event for learning reinforcement.
Future Service Development
As noted, we are trying to support lecture capture across a range of teaching rooms with a range of equipment designs and different generations of technology. To continue to provide the best possible learning & teaching experience, we will now seek funding to bring old teaching rooms up to the new standard set by the hybrid teaching rooms. Even though full hybrid capability is not required in these rooms, the underlying technology has significantly increased quality, reliability, ease of use and upgradability. As always, watch this space.