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. 2 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
3 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. 3 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. 4
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 7
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 4 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. 8 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. 12 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 6 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. 13
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 7 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? 8 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. 9 10 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.