I just lead a small discussion for a few faculty and instructional technologists today over lunch about lecture capture what what would need to happen to get people to try it at Williams. I lead off with a quick slide show to define some terms and to provide some seed questions, then we just talked for about 30 minutes.  Here are the major points I took away from it:

• to make this work we need some way of recording stuff written on a board (we could maybe emulate that with a tablet, sympodium, or smart board, but that’s not ideal)
• the audio is important, but not the video of the talking head; point the camera somewhere more useful
• look into dual-camera systems instead of just camera-projector systems
• the non-fixed installation is better thought of as temporary / movable rather than truly mobile / portable (and, in general we need to find out more about the movable systems)
• some faculty are probably willing to try it at some point
• it might be a really good fit with tutorials for letting different sections see each other’s discussions
• the ability to jump to / find particular points in a lecture is very important and maybe needs to be improved
• some concern about students spending limited time re-listening to lectures rather than doing other course work

One of the big selling points seemed to be that people at other institutions were trying it and finding it useful. Here’s a set of links to some public info I found about that:

• http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/News/lecturecapturing.html
• http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/News/NERCOMPHandout.pdf
• http://www.echo360.tv/customers/umass.asp
• http://campustechnology.com/articles/52017/
• http://www.dartmouth.edu/~create/
• http://edc.carleton.ca/blog/index.php/2008/02/12/enhanced-lecture-podcasting-benefits/
• http://insidedigitalmedia.com/how-students-use-video-recordings-of-college-lectures-part-1-of-2/
• http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/LectureCaptureWhatCanBeAu/40028

The short summary of all those is:

• faculty and students who have tried a lecture capture system have liked it.
• students self-report that it helps their learning
• it has a positive impact on student grades, primarily helping the C and D students (it’s especially good for those who want to learn but are having difficulty with the material)
• there’s little solid data about attendance rates, but anecdotal observation and self-reporting suggest that, counter-intuitively, it’s largely or completely unaffected