This year, I had the opportunity to represent Duke at the Streaming Media West Conference by participating in the panel “Best Practices for Education & Training Video.” Having seen the growth and development of our online course production over the past six years, it was fascinating to see the approaches that other institutions were pursuing.
The University of Southern California has been streaming interactive lectures over Facebook Live. The approach utilizes a blend of green-screen lectures, interviews and discussions, and instantaneous feedback from viewers. A sample can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/scctsi/review/300228463/c6fc3030f5. Gary San Angel, the Distance Education Specialist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, noted that the live and interactive format of the lecture significantly increased the viewer engagement compared to their typical video output. Students watched more of the video and had better retention.
USC Price Director of Video Productions and Operations Services, Jonathan Schwartz, largely focused on his team’s live-streaming workflow. They use a mix of of encoders, content delivery networks and publishing platforms, and their commitment to production quality and value had me considering how live-streaming could be incorporated into Duke’s online course development.
While Duke has a great lecture capture system in DukeCapture, the focus of our online courses is in offline production where we have instructors set aside time to record standalone lectures in the studio for an online audience. This ensures that each video is focused on a specific learning objective and conveys that in a short amount of time. Live classroom recordings don’t usually lend themselves well to this priority, but both schools at USC have found ways to work around that limitation.
By working with instructors to design their classroom material to keep an online audience in mind, and by outfitting those classroom’s lecture capture infrastructure with potential live-tracking and live-switching abilities, we would be able to create a workflow that reduces both the bottleneck of the persistently busy professor and the ever growing demand for high-quality educational video.
