Ce n t e r f o r Ap p l i e d Re s e a r c h

Resear ch Bul l et i n Vol ume 2009, I ssue 24

December 1, 2009
Capt ur i ng Lec t ur es:
No Br ai ner or St i c k y Wi c k et ?


EDUCAUSE
J oshua Kim, Dartmouth College and ECAR
4772 Walnut Street, Suite 206 Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.educause.edu/ecar/
Because developing and transferring knowledge within communities is a part of our
educational mission, an infrastructure that empowers us to configure and contextualize
our world levers this mission. However, as with unbundling, the sword cuts both ways.
Richard N. Katz, 2008, The Tower and the Cloud
Over vi ew
University lectures delivered through Web 2.0 publishing platforms represent one
example of how the cloud is unbundling learning from courses and disintermediating
faculty from learners. At one time, the technology used to capture university lectures fell
clearly into a technology domain that was administered by people who deliver
technology services to colleges and universities. In a simple model, course lectures
were captured by the institution, stored on institutional servers, and made available to
those enrolled in the course. Web 2.0 technologies are challenging this simple model.
This bulletin describes how the formerly separate domains of lecture capture
technologies and the emerging options for publicly sharing lectures on Web 2.0
consumer platforms are destined for convergence and are raising important questions
related to policy, control, and governance. Lecture capture and cloud-based consumer
publishing platforms are creating a range of opportunities and challenges for academic
leaders that will touch on issues of openness, transparency, outreach, and responsibility.
Consider this: Lectures recorded on the major commercial lecture capture platforms can
be easily shared on venues such as iTunes U or YouTube EDU. Indeed, most of the
lecture capture systems now offer direct upload to these platforms, or they advertise this
feature in their product roadmaps. The desire among some campus constituents to use
lecture capture solutions to distribute lectures on the emerging (and free) Web 2.0
publishing platforms will be strong. Many on campus point to the success of initiatives
from the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; MIT; Princeton University;
Stanford University; and Yale University as evidence of the value in making these
lectures widely available.
At the same time, efforts to share recorded lectures beyond the confines of registered
students will run up against a variety of objections. These objections range from the
practical (the need to clear copyrighted materials and get permissions) to the
philosophical (do we really want to expose the range of teaching on our campus to the
world?).
The combination of lecture capture and consumer Web 2.0 publishing systems will
challenge the capacity of campus leadership to manage and direct how technology is
used in teaching and learning. When instructors possess the tools to bypass the central
information technology (IT) organization and decide for themselves to share their
lectures with the world, some of them will choose to do so, especially in the absence of
an institutional policy that forbids posting of faculty lectures on commercial sites. The
choice is not whether faculty members will publish their lectures online for the world to
see but whether this activity will be supported, managed, branded, and leveraged by the
institution.
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Hi ghl i ght s of Lec t ur e Capt ur e
EDUCAUSE defines lecture capture as an umbrella term describing any technology that
allows instructors to record what happens in class and make it available digitally.
1
The
decision about which lecture capture system to deploy has most often been a tactical
choice. The decision rests on evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each system
against the institutions requirements. Even the decision about whether or not to capture
and share lectures with enrolled students in a given class remains tactical, almost
always decided in collaboration between the faculty member and the relevant supporting
technology unit. The questions at the course level revolve around balancing the benefits
to student learning against both the costs of attendance and the dollars involved in
purchasing and operating a lecture capture system.
The choice of whether to publish these captured lectures to public Web 2.0 platforms
such as iTunes U or YouTube EDU is very much a strategic one. Campus leaders must
weigh the benefits of sharing and wide distribution against the costs making this material
available.
Questions arise about which lectures and courses should be published and shared.
These questions include:
Will only lectures by the institutions most erudite scholars and dynamic
professors be shared, or will the published lectures be more inclusive?
Who decides which lectures are shared? If a faculty member wants her lectures
posted on iTunes U or YouTube EDU (and the lecture capture software supports
this with automatic or one-button uploading), will a policy be necessary to
support or thwart these postings?
Do all published lectures reflect and add value to the brand of institution?
How does the posting of lectures on iTunes U or YouTube EDU impact the
competitive advantage of the institution? What will result if the policy of our
institution differs from that of peer or competing institutions?
These strategic questions are best addressed while lecture capture technologies are still
developing and are just beginning to be implemented on a wide scale. Waiting to
engage in dialogue and discussions in order to develop policy on this issue will result in
behaviors that might not always be aligned with the institutions strategic priorities.
Aut omat ed Syst ems
The ability to easily capture lectures using automated systems that integrate the
speakers voice, slide deck, and often a video feed are rapidly proliferating. Vendors
such as Tegrity, Echo
360
, TechSmith, MediaSite, and Panopto are aggressively rolling
out products and platforms to capture the lecture-recording market. Opencast, a
partnership funded by grants from the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations, is in the
process of developing a proposal to build an enterprise-level, easy-to-install open source
podcast and rich media capture, processing, and delivery system.
2

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Adoption of lecture capture systems is being driven by both student demand and an
increasing awareness of the efficacy of these tools for enhanced learning. In September
2008, David Nagel reported, According to new research released this week by the
University of WisconsinMadison involving about 7,500 undergraduate and graduate
students, an overwhelming 82 percent of students said they would prefer courses that
offer online lectures over traditional classes that do not include an online lecture
component.
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Students reported that the main benefits of having lectures available
online include the convenience of making up for missed classes, improving retention of
class materials, improving test scores, and reviewing materials before class. Over 60%
of students reported that they would even pay a fee to have lecture capture available.
The authors of the report from UW-Madison concluded that:
It is clear from the survey results that undergraduate students would value the
webcasting of lectures and that, given the choice, would prefer a course in
which lecture content is recorded and streamed over one that is not.
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While lecture capture remains controversial among some faculty (the Chronicle of Higher
Education reports many professors worry that as soon as recordings are available,
classroom seats will collect dust
5
), interest in both systems and best practices remains
healthy among EDUCAUSE members.
Despite the concerns, it appears that most colleges and universities are either actively
pursing lecture capture programs or are investigating the options. The EDUCAUSE
lecture capture resource web page
6
lists roughly 20 publications and presentations on
the topic. A search on the EDUCAUSE website for lecture capture resulted in 965 hits.
Sessions at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference dealing with lecture capture were
observed to be well attended, and the companies offering lecture capture solutions
continue to take up increasing floor space (and produce more elaborate booths) in the
exhibit hall at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference.
As of today the majority of captured lectures are distributed using the publishing tools of
the lecture capture vendor, often in conjunction with the institutions course management
system (CMS). Restricting access to lectures behind the authentication of the CMS
sidesteps a number of thorny issues involved in publishing lectures that can be viewed
by individuals not enrolled in the course at hand. The advantages of restricting access
include:
Obviating the need to secure rights for images, video clips, or materials from
rights holders under provisions of the TEACH Act
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Retaining control of the colleges intellectual property
Providing added value for the students through features such as keyword
search, fast playback, and annotation with proprietary vendor publishing
platforms
Restricting access to lecture content to enrolled and authenticated users, however, runs
counter to the higher education culture of openness, transparency, and sharing. Both
faculty and campus leadership are starting to ask if the tradeoffs for restricting access
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and maintaining control are worth the costs of being absent from the marketplace of
ideas and material available on Web 2.0 social publishing sites.
Web 2.0 Lec t ur e Publ i shi ng Pl at f or ms
Concurrent with the growth in demand for lecture capture and an increasing number of
lecture capture software vendors has been the emergence of Web 2.0 public-facing
lecture delivery platforms. iTunes U was first released in May of 2007 on the Apple
iTunes store. This pilot project included lecture and other learning content from six
institutions: Brown University, Duke University, Stanford University, the University of
Michigan School of Dentistry, the University of Missouri School of J ournalism, and UW
Madison. As of J uly 2009, more than 200 universities and colleges upload lectures,
talks, and other campus-produced educational content to iTunes U.
YouTube has become another important publishing platform for lecture and other
campus content. The education channel on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/edu)
includes material from over 150 institutions. While not all the content on YouTubes
education channel is lectures or even academic materials, some of the lectures have a
wide viewership. By J uly 2009, an integrative biology lecture on the Organization of the
Body from UC Berkeley had been viewed more than 338,000 times.
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In his 2008
Chronicle of Higher Education article, YouTube Professors: Scholars as Online Video
Stars, J eff Young commented:
professors are the latest YouTube stars. The popularity of their appearance
on YouTube and other video-sharing sites may end up opening up the
classroom and making teachingwhich once took place behind closed
doorsa more public art.
9

The motivations for colleges and universities to make lectures available for public
viewing are consistent. This motivation is summed up in the Open Yale Courses site:
While it has long upheld the principle that education is best built upon direct
interactions among teachers, students, and staff, Yale also believes that
leading universities can make an important contribution to expanding access to
educational resources through the use of Internet technology. The goals of the
project also align with the Universitys aim to increase its presence and
strengthen its relationships internationally.
10

Publishing lectures to public Web 2.0 platforms or directly on institution sites can also be
an effective tool for connecting with alumni or prospective students. Evidence from the
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project indicates that a robust set of online course and
lecture materials may be effective in reaching these audiences. According to a
November 2008 talk by Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, 35% of MIT freshmen who knew
about OCW reported that availability of the materials significantly influenced their
decision to attend the institution. Fully half of MIT alumni have logged into the OCW site,
making these materials an important resource for maintaining connections with students
once they graduate.
11

5
Placing lectures on publicly accessible Web 2.0 publishing sites, however, has led to
some unintended consequences. Once the lectures are released, it is not always clear
how they will be used. The recent launch of the site Academic Earth
(http://academicearth.org/) represents one such instance. This for-profit site features
lectures from Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Yale. Academic
Earth was neither created nor supported by the institutions that provide its content.
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The
founders of Academic Earth are taking advantage of the stature of the institutions and
the nature of freely available (and linkable) web lectures to build a business.
One must assume that institutions that have chosen to participate in social media and
Web 2.0 publishing by uploading lectures and other academic content to platforms such
as iTunes U and YouTube EDU believe that the benefits outweigh the risks. How will this
calculus change once the diffusion of lecture capture systems bring the ability to upload
and share lectures to individual faculty and departments? If every instructor can also be
a broadcaster (or at least take advantage of broadcast-like tools), it can be expected that
some will take the plunge.
When Lec t ur e Capt ur e and Web 2.0 Pl at f or ms Conver ge
Together, lecture capture tools and Web 2.0 publishing platforms such as iTunes U and
YouTube EDU represent a much more significant opportunity then either tool in isolation.
Lecture capture systems have the advantage of lowering the barriers to recording
classes by automating many of the processes that previously needed to be done by
skilled media professionals. These systems can be set to begin recording on a schedule,
eliminating the need for the professor to remember to start and stop the recording.
Lecture capture systems automatically combine inputs from the computer (the slide
deck), audio, and often video to produce a synchronized presentation without the need
for this step to be accomplished in post-production.
Vendors of lecture capture products have almost universally viewed the publishing of the
captured lectures as part of the complete end-to-end system. The published lectures are
presented through the browser in a proprietary wrapper that allows viewers (students)
to search and annotate the video. Links to the captured lectures, and authentication for
students to access the lectures, can be integrated through the CMS for single sign-on
and access to the materials.
This model, however, is starting to change as customers request lecture output that is
not dependent on (or locked in to) a proprietary format or ongoing vendor licensing.
Colleges and universities dont want access to their content to rely on the continued
survival and ongoing relationship with a single company. This need, in addition to the
emergence of platforms such as iTunes U and YouTube EDU, has led the major
vendors of lecture capture systems to offer one-touch uploads to these platforms.
What I t Means t o Hi gher Educ at i on
The opportunities and questions raised by the emerging technologies of lecture capture
and Web 2.0 publishing platforms are surfacing within the larger disruptive force that
cloud computing is having on the academy. Web 2.0 platforms such as iTunes U and
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YouTube EDU are good examples of the potential for cloud-based applications to
challenge our traditional assumptions and methods within higher education. These
disruptions will occur whether or not the decision is made to share lecture content as
part of a strategic campus-wide initiative. Once an individual faculty member takes
advantage of one-touch upload provided by the new lecture capture system, the die is
cast.
In The Gathering Cloud: Is This the End of the Middle? Katz identifies four areas in
which the emergence of consumer-based web services will impact higher education.
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Unbundl i ng
Lectures published to Web 2.0 platforms disintermediate the professor from the learner
and unbundle the lecture from the course, the course from the degree. The upside of
this unbundling, as Katz describes, is that:
Savvy education providers with strong brands will be able to enlarge their
institutional footprint by organizing education and other institutional services for
delivery to new students, customers, patrons, and fans.
14

This unbundling, however, as Katz recognizes, can have real, disruptive consequences
to the management and control of the institutions resources and brand. Individual
faculty decisions to upload lectures will project the brand of the institution outside of how
that institution wishes to control its brand. Alternatively, disabling the one-click upload
features of lecture capture systems to popular cloud-based Web 2.0 publishing systems
will raise a different set of questions about control and autonomy.
Demand-Pul l
The conjunction of lecture capture and Web 2.0 publishing platforms will help feed the
demand from professors for tools to disseminate their lectures and the demand from
students for web-based lectures to consume. The evidence from the UWMadison study
and others clearly points to the desire among students to have recorded lectures
available for preview and review.
The demand for matriculated students to shop for courses by previewing lectures may
become commonplace, just as prospective students may favor applying to institutions
where they can search for and view dynamic teaching on the web. Alumni might come to
demand access to web-based lectures to connect them to their alma mater, or at the
very least the office of development might loudly insist that offering this service is a good
idea. Faculty might realize that in an attention economy, the surest route to
marginalization is obscurity, and seeing YouTube stars emerge in their discipline may
inspire them to make their lectures available via the cloud.
Ubi qui t ous Ac c ess
Lecture capture systems publishing to cloud-based Web 2.0 publishing platforms lower
the barriers to creating and socializing this information and knowledge. The easy
availability of the corpus of teaching content produced each day on our campuses can
carry with it the potential for colleges and universities to hold places of central
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importance to those affiliated with the institutions. The flip side of ubiquitous access to
lecture material will be uneven quality, something that was once hidden and will be
increasingly exposed. Institutions could control quality when they were carefully
choosing which faculty and courses to upload to publicly available sites. This control
diminishes as the ability to publish becomes ubiquitous.
With ubiquity also comes an elevated expectation that content (lectures) will be
available. Institutions that are not sharing course and lecture content and are not
enabling faculty to capture and upload courses may be perceived as being out of touch
and less relevant. Faculty who choose not to record and share their lectures may come
under pressure to conform to changing norms of openness and transparency.
The Ri se of t he Pur e Pr oper t y Vi ew of I deas
Ubiquitous lecture capture devices coupled with one-step uploading and sharing will
challenge institutions to balance the concerns of rights holders with the imperatives of
teaching. Will faculty be constrained from using images, diagrams, and video clips in
their lectures if these lectures become publicly available? How much of the work used in
lectures that will be shared on Web 2.0 platforms needs to be cleared for copyright, or
does the law allow for repurposing and remixing to create something new (the lecture)?
The technology to capture and share lectures will likely run ahead of our institutions
abilities to understand the legal framework and lay down policies. This tension will create
opportunities for teachable moments and discussions within our institutions and with our
students. The need to navigate copyright in the face of the desire to create and share,
and the development of easy and inexpensive tools and platforms to meet this demand,
will be one of the debates that will define the era of the cloud.
Key Quest i ons t o Ask
How can we engage in a proactive dialogue with campus stakeholders to craft
policies and guidelines for sharing lectures on Web 2.0 social media publishing
platforms that align with campus strategic objectives?
Can we afford not to have our teaching and faculty included in the larger
learning ecosystem outside of our classroom walls?
How can the emerging technologies of lecture capture and Web 2.0 lecture
publishing and distribution both serve our enrolled students and our larger
missions to connect with prospective students, alumni, and lifelong learners?
To what degree are we thinking about the downstream possibilities of cloud-
based social platforms when initiating lecture capture programs?
How can our institutions use emerging technologies such as lecture capture and
Web 2.0 publishing platforms to adapt and thrive in a world built on
transparency, sharing, and participation?
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Wher e t o Lear n Mor e
Apple Education. A Guided Tour of iTunes U.
http://www.apple.com/education/guidedtours/itunesu.html.
EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. 7 Things You Should Know About Lecture
Capture. Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE, December 2008.
http://www.educause.edu/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutLectu/163555.
EDUCAUSE Lecture Capture Resources Page.
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/LectureCapture/34358.
Katz, Richard N. The Gathering Cloud: Is This the End of the Middle? In The
Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing, edited
by Richard N. Katz. Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE, 2008.
http://www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud.
Ack now l edgment s
The author is most grateful to the members of the Ivy+Media Group for providing
insights into their efforts on lecture capture and debates on Web 2.0 social media sites
on their campuses.
Endnot es
1. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, 7 Things You Should Know About Lecture Capture (Boulder, CO:
EDUCAUSE, 2008), http://www.educause.edu/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutLectu/163555.
2. Opencast Community Project, Matterhorn, http://www.opencastproject.org/project/matterhorn.
3. David Nagel, Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional? Campus Technology (September 25, 2008),
http://www.campustechnology.com/Articles/2008/09/Lecture-Capture-No-Longer-Optional.aspx.
4. Raj Veeramani and Sandra Bradley, Insights Regarding Undergraduate Preference for Lecture Capture
(University of WisconsinMadison, September 23, 2008), http://www.uwebi.org/news/uw-online-
learning.pdf, 7.
5. J effrey R. Young, The Lectures are Recorded, So Why Go to Class? Chronicle of Higher Education
(May 16, 2008), http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i36/36a00103.htm.
6. EDUCAUSE Lecture Capture Resources web page,
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/LectureCapture/34358.
7. EDUCAUSE TEACH Act Resources web page,
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/TEACHAct/33345.
8. Integrative Biology 131Lecture 01: Organization of the Body,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9WtBRNydso&feature=channel_page.
9. J effrey R. Young, YouTube Professors: Scholars as Online Video Stars, Chronicle of Higher Education
(J anuary 25, 2008), http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i20/20a01901.htm.
10. Open Yale Courses, http://oyc.yale.edu/about#q2.
11. Shiegeru Miyagawa, Talk at Dartmouth on OpenCourseWare, November 7, 2008,
http://www.slideshare.net/joshmkim/shigeru-miyagawa-talk-at-dartmouth-on-opencourseware-11708-
presentation.
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12. J effrey R. Young, New For-Profit Web Site Repackages Free Lecture Videos from Colleges. Wired
Campus, Chronicle of Higher Education (February 2, 2009), http://chronicle.com/blogPost/New-For-Profit-
Web-Site/4507.
13. Richard N. Katz, The Gathering Cloud: Is This the End of the Middle? in The Tower and the Cloud:
Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing, edited by Richard N. Katz (Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE,
2008), http://www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud/PUB7202d.
14. Ibid, 15.
About t he Aut hor
Joshua Kim (joshua.kim@dartmouth.edu) is Senior Learning Technologist at Dartmouth
College and an ECAR Fellow.


















Copyr i ght
Copyright 2009 EDUCAUSE and J oshua Kim. All rights reserved. This ECAR research bulletin is proprietary
and intended for use only by subscribers. Reproduction, or distribution of ECAR research bulletins to those not
formally affiliated with the subscribing organization, is strictly prohibited unless prior permission is granted by
EDUCAUSE and the author.
Ci t at i on f or Thi s Wor k
Kim, J oshua. Capturing Lectures: No Brainer or Sticky Wicket? (Research Bulletin, Issue 24). Boulder, CO:
EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2009, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.