Tag: multimedia

Recording Lectures using Zoom

When teaching online, blended, flipped classes, or preparing for class cancelations, recording your lectures can be an extremely useful technique.

I recommend using Zoom since Penn State has a license for all faculty, staff, and students. If you have any technical questions, you can contact the Helpdesk for assistance.

Here is a list of steps and related best practices:

  1. Quiet space
    1. Do not disturb signs
    2. Let others know that you’ll be recording
    3. Turn off notifications and silence your devices
  2. Prepare
    1. Plug in and test your headset or microphone
    2. Download the Zoom desktop client
    3. Adjust your Preferences
      1. Cloud Recording preferences overview
      2. Adjust recording preferences
        1. Check “Optimize the recording for 3rd party video editor” option
        2. Check “Audio transcript” option
    4. Record
      1. Consider chunking your presentations down into natural sub-topics
      2. Switch to Presentation-mode if you are sharing your slides
      3. For first recordings or when recording in a new space, record only a minute or so and check that recording to make sure everything looks good before recording your entire video
    5. Share
      1. Zoom will send you email notification(s) when your cloud recording is done processing
      2. Access your recordings
      3. Copy the Share link and distribute it to your students

Please contact the Office of Learning Design or check out the online web resources with questions.

VR and AR instead of textbooks?

La Trobe University swaps textbooks for VR and AR

The 12-week pilot aims to help students improve spatial awareness, explorative learning, and accessibility to 3D anatomical images.

I’ll be curious to find out how well these students perform compared to others who learn via more traditional means. On the surface, the use of these technologies make a lot of sense.

I’m trying to think of the faculty here at the College of IST to see if there are any potential applications of xR (or Extended Reality encompassing Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality / Mixed Reality) in our classrooms. Even if there were possible use cases, implementation would be much more difficult since there aren’t likely to be any existing off-the-self options for content. Anatomy has been studied for well over two millennia (source) and has amassed a huge amount of content related pedagogical approaches. Digital technology is growing so quickly that the content rapidly becomes obsolete. We would need to find a solution that would allow for rapid xR development. Apple and others claim that we are now able to do this, but I have yet to research the options.

I think the best use cases would be the introduction complex spacial or virtual concepts. Perhaps being able to “see” how web packets move through the internet while encountering various forms of hardware and software along the way. If that visualization could be contextualize to a desktop computer, for instance, sitting on the desk to include the “cloud” around them would be pretty cool. I think it would be pretty cool to use a virtual Enigma Machine to see how substitution encryption works. One would not only be able to change the rotors and encrypt / decrypt messages, but be able to disassemble the machine to see how it worked.

One possible piece of almost-existing content that might be incorporated could be an xR version of a working Minecraft computer. We don’t teach computer sciences courses here, but how awesome is this project?!

Moving way outside of our subject matter area, I would think that astronomy classes might be the next frontier to pilot this kind of pedagogical approach – replacing textbooks with xR technologies.

…there are plans to expand the technology to be used for all anatomy courses, including physiotherapy, podiatry, and speech pathology at all La Trobe university campuses…

Storyboards for Analytic Exercises for Col. Jacob Graham

I started working with Howard on developing a few multimedia deliverables for one of our faculty, Col. Jacob Graham, who teaches SRA courses here at the College of IST.

Based on materials from Jake, I storyboarded some concepts that we’ll be building on this summer. I forgot how much I love storyboarding!

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Moving Canvas Video Assets to Box.psu.edu

I’ve finally begun a project with our multimedia specialists to move our video content in Canvas to Box.psu.edu. We have a few courses that include downloadable video files as stored assets within Canvas. We were still working out our workflow at the time, and we decided that we need to do something better that our default.

Some of our students are commuting and prefer to have videos on their devices so that they can watch the content while on-the-go. By using Box.psu.edu, we have unlimited amount of storage to put our video assets for students. Box provides revisioning, access from various platforms, syncing to the cloud, collaboration, and more. We’re currently using College resources to store live and working documents and while that’s been great in the past, we’re enjoying new functionality with Box.

I’ve created a screencast of a discussion about what an initial workflow will look like. Howard is going to start and document changes as he goes.

[Internal: see Footprints Ticket #806]

Update to Recording Lectures

I’ve updated my Evernote: Recording Lectures.

I used this page to document processes and strategies for faculty-authors to make the task of recording audio content for online lectures easier. I start off with some specific information on how to make a recording using Audacity. I even have a screencast that I’ve made to walk the audience through one possible workflow. The second-half of my notes covers best practices that will help with the planning, recording, and post-recording phases. These notes are helpful when I sit down with faculty-authors and serve as a good reminder for both of us because there are a lot of considerations when setting out to capture high-quality audio content.

This update is related to a revision of SRA 221: Overview of Information Security where I’m trying something new for our department: hired professional voice talent. I made a connection and was able to find a fantastic graduate student who will be perfect for the job. We’re still working on back-end paperwork, but I’m confident that we can work something out.