Geanangel, R., Baez-Franchesci, S., Hazelrigg, J., & Doan, Q. (2004). An inexpensive method for recording lectures without use of a video recorder. The Texas Journal of Distance Learning [Online serial], 1(1), 20-24. Available: http://www.txjdl.org/articles/1/lectures/
An Inexpensive Method for Recording Lectures Without Use of a Video Recorder
Recording lectures for later use is a method used by instructors for some time as a means of helping students learn course material and prepare for exams. Except in distance education courses where recorded lectures may be necessary, the method has not been widely adopted, however, probably due to the extra effort and resources required to produce instructive recordings and make them available to members of the class. Unless lectures can be held in studios settings with permanently installed video and audio equipment, a luxury few of us have, instructors face the daunting task of setting up, testing, operating and taking down the considerable amount of equipment needed. In most cases, a “crew” of experienced technicians needs to be present in the classroom to assure consistent, quality production. Where adequate resources are available, good quality recordings have been produced benefiting students in introductory chemistry [1]. Our experience suggests, however, that relatively few schools offer the level of support needed for conventional lecture recording.
With the expanding availability of LCD data projectors in classrooms has come a trend toward preparing chemistry lectures in digital format employing software such as ChemDraw© [2] and using PowerPoint© [3] to present the material on an electronic data projector in class. We have been using digital presentations in some sections of our freshman chemistry course for science majors during the past several years. Copies of the presentation files were made available in electronic format for students’ use. A high percentage of our students support themselves by working and surveys suggested that actual recordings of the lectures and workshops/reviews might be more effective as study aides.
Given our support circumstances, it was evident that any viable recording procedure would have to be simple, so as to add as little as possible to the pre- and post-class routine of the instructor, be transparent to the students to avoid distraction, need no studio or “crew” and be digitally based so the media produced could be prepared for web dissemination with a minimal amount of effort. The only technique we found that met these requirements was a dynamic screen and audio capture program running in the background on the computer used for the presentation. One lecturer (RG) was using a Macintosh© computer for which a suitable screen capture program, Snapz Pro X© [4] was available. A comparable Windows© program, Camtasia© [5], is also available. The Snapz Pro X utility, described hereafter, has the capability of recording sequential screen captures and an audio (microphone) track while running in the background under MacOS X© (v. 10.2) then assembling the images and sound into a QuickTime© video clip. In our implementation, the clip file was compressed and converted to MPEG-4 format with suitable preparation for streaming from an Apple Streaming Server©. Details of the implementation, a link on which the results can be viewed, and a discussion of the results are presented in the following sections.