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Drexel Puts Course Capture To Work on Desktops
10/24/2007
Instructional Support
The university also uses Camtasia for short tutorials on a range of support services topics, according to Janice Biros, associate vice president of instructional technology support at Drexel, such as registration instructions for freshman. The HR department has also started to use Camtasia to record and post audio and video recordings for new employee orientation.
Creating content in Camtasia by recording a lecture or desktop session is one side of the equation, but publishing that content is another, often time-consuming and intimidating one. To address that, Drexel has a created a sophisticated system that alleviates the need of professors and staff to handle the publishing side. Using a so-called digital drop box, users can almost instantly have a rich media file, such as a recording done in Camtasia, encoded and published. They do that by simply leaving the file at an online location that will then publish multimedia recordings, in any desired format, without further interaction from the instructor.
"It makes Camtasia that much more valuable," Morris said. "It reduces the overhead of taking that last step and putting [the content] out there on the Web." A large number of faculty, even those that don't use Camtasia, are taking advantage of the drop box, which recently won an innovation award from Campus Technology.
Drexel handles training for faculty and staff by requiring initial users--anyone who requests a license, essential--to attend an introductory training session on the product. That's done partly to help control support calls by new users, according to Mike Scheuermann, director of Drexel's online learning group.
That's followed by an intermediate two-hour hands-on training, which includes a CD that Scheuermann has made, with various media files in which users construct a project, combine projects, use the storyboard, make transitions, encode files, and more.
Using Camtasia, whether for classroom lecture capture or desktop sessions, helps fulfill students' expectation of a high-level technology experience at Drexel. "Students today are not satisfied with going to class and hearing it once, and that's it," Biros says. "They demand re-read and re-use and re-listen to whenever they would like. That's how they work with other resources on the Internet, and that's what they're demanding from professors."
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Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.
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