Enhancing course content through lecture recordings and new Web technologies

Abstract

Podcasting has recently seen rapid expansion as a means of delivering audio content to listeners. Podcasting is one of the emerging Web technologies which include Blogs, Wikis, and Social Bookmarks. These technologies provide yet another opportunity for instructors in higher education to enhance their course content, by using additional channels for information delivery to their students and enhancing collaborative learning. In this thesis we report our experience with the use of Podcasting as a means of delivering online recorded audio of classroom lectures to enhance students’ learning. A number of universities have deployed institution-wide infrastructure to support Podcasting of recorded lecture. In contrast to their approach, we set up Podcasting of recorded lecture with minimal institutional and infrastructure support. In the early stage of our research, students are only provided with audio recording. Student feedback at that time indicated that students preferred either a video recording of a classroom lecture, or an annotated and indexed audio of the lecture so that they can locate the content easily. Therefore, we developed ReCap, a tool for automated capture and creation of synchronized audio, PowerPoint and digital ink presentation in Real media format. Our tool captures a classroom lecture in real-time. Recorded presentations are then made available through a Podcast to which students can subscribe using any Podcast receiver. A slide level and pen stroke level indexed presentation is also supported on Internet Explorer. By avoiding full-fledged video capture, file sizes are kept significantly smaller, typically requiring only about 10 Mb for a one-hour lecture. Another salient feature of our tool is that it requires no post-processing to create the synchronized media, thus saving significant post-production effort. ReCap requires minimal hardware support: a Windows-based PC with sound recording capability for capturing the lecture dynamics, and a Web server with PHP support