16 November 2010
By Evan Peterson, Director of Instructional Technology and Digital Media
Estudio had a request. Okay, many requests of the same nature. How can I record my class; video, voice, computer, document camera and make it available to my students? Oh, and by the way, it has to be posted in D2L. And it has to be easy.
We looked at many possible solutions to the problem. We found one product rose to the top in it's class. Tegrity, a lecture-capture solution, is robust in functionality, easy to use. An instructor is able to record her own video and audio, plus the computer screen at the same time. The recording interface is simple, powerful, and flexible. At full integration the video will automatically be linked into her D2L course when she stops the recording.
Students can make notes and bookmark them into the Tegrity recordings. They can download them to watch, play them back, and even put them onto their MP3 device. They have thumbnails for easy navigation through the recordings, and text based slides become topic searchable. The instructor also has the option to give students the ability to record presentations of their own.
The Tegrity lecture-capture system looks very promising. But, the only way to be sure if it a good solution for SCC on an enterprise level is to do a pilot project. That is where we are now. We will be upgrading technology in several classrooms and training six SCC faculty on how to use Tegrity. These faculty will use Tegrity for the Spring 2011 semester. They will use it thoroughly, testing it's limits to help determine if this lecture-capture solution is a good fit for our school. In May the pilot faculty will present their experiences of lecture-capture using Tegrity. At that point we'll know if we should proceed with Tegrity or go back to other possible solutions.
