Pre-Web Days and Next Steps

FEEDS was pre World Wide Web, so, initially, the mode of delivery was hard videotape. UCF engineering faculty would teach and record their face-to-face classes inside fancy multimedia rooms with television cameras, and then the videotapes were transported by automobile to the consortium-member campuses.

"That went on for about 20 years," explains Al Ducharme, CECS assistant dean, Distance and Distributed Learning. The next mode of delivery adoption entailed taking the television cable and signal (called an NTSC cable for National Television Standards Committee) and plugging it into a computer with video capture capabilities, allowing for the production of a digital recording of the course that could be published on the Internet. "By this time, which Ducharme calculates as about six years ago, the equipment and recording methods were starting to age. The NTSC standard, for instance, produces a relatively low screen resolution. "It is the quality of a YouTube or iPod video (for smaller screens); it was not that good of quality. By 2006, we were beginning to fall behind in terms of the quality of what we were streaming out to our students."

Change on the Horizon

Ducharme, who started working for UCF as an engineering professor five years ago, was assigned a FEEDS course. He found that out of a class of 30 students, maybe two or three would show up because they had opted to view it online instead. So, being "sort of a gadgety guy who liked to play with video and video editing," Ducharme hooked up a web cam and microphone to his laptop and started taping his FEEDS class from his office with a free trial of a popular screen recording and presentation software. He says the video quality became "infinitely better. Students started talking to other students. It caught on that I was doing this from my office. People started asking why couldn’t we do this for more classes."

By the following semester, 15 instructors were taping courses from their offices using the same kind of set up that Ducharme had initiated. However, there was one drawback: "For every hour of class, it took about two hours to produce the video," he says, referring to the time it took to encode his production as well as burn it onto a CD and physically walk it down to the person running the server where these videos were ultimately archived in the FEEDS database.

Nonetheless, an increasing number of engineering instructors were asking about his videotaping, and he started to informally train some of his colleagues on how to set up their own office-based recording systems. Then, one day, "the dean put his hand on my shoulder and said ‘we need to change distance education; we need to change and overhaul FEEDS; I really like what you are doing; can you do it for the whole College?’

"When the dean asks you to do something, you nod your head and say ‘yes,’" Ducharme jokes.

Searching for a Better Solution

The side of the college where Ducharme works is comprised of 150 instructors who teach about 3,000 students. The challenge he now faced was how would he obtain and store enough individual software purchases to give every instructor what he or she needed to record. "I’m thinking that I have to pass discs out and show all of them how to use the software. It was daunting," he says, adding that the college has a good number of older faculty who are not exactly ready or willing to adopt video screen capture and presentation educational software.

"I started looking at what else is available, and there must be at least 50 programs you could get, and they all end up being fairly complex," Ducharme explains. "I started going to technology shows, looking around at different technologies . . . My thinking was I would like to give every instructor his own mini recording studio so he can record anywhere he wants - in his office, in a hotel room at a conference."

The solution became a Tegrity account that the entire college could access. This allowed any instructor with a web-cam and a microphone either built in or hooked up to their computer to log-in to the Tegrity web-based service, open their personal account, and record and upload their recorded course presentation to the server where it’s archived for viewing by students almost immediately.

Successful Adoption

"Now we have more instructors recording in their offices," says Ducharme. "You walk down the hall and you see papers signs on their doors - ‘recording in progress.’ The optimal setup that some of the instructors now have is a Tablet PC with a built-in web cam and microphone. They literally turn on their Tablet, start Tegrity, and, with their digital pen in hand, give a lecture from anywhere."

Another benefit of this implementation is that all those instructors who record from wherever it is most convenient for them obviously do not need to reserve a time slot in a multimedia room to record their FEEDS lectures. "It has enabled us to say, in terms of scheduling, that every classroom in the college that we have control over is now a FEEDS room," Ducharme notes. "We can record FEEDS classes from any classroom. Now, my other hope is that we can expand beyond FEEDS and have rich-media content produced for every face-to-face class."

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