Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/42073
technology Lecture Capture Yet to Take Hold MANY SCHOOLS PROVIDE their faculty with soft- ware that allows them to capture the video, audio, and computer screen content of their lectures and upload it online for students to review. For instance, the Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business in Colum- bus has made Panopto's lecture capture technology available to its faculty for two years. However, at Fisher, like many other business schools, professors resist employing the software in their classrooms. Why? Eva Bradshaw, Ohio State's director of educational technologies, identifies three primary reasons: Fear of decreased student attendance. Professors are hesitant to provide all course content online, because they fear some students might be tempted to substitute recorded lectures for the real thing. Professors who use the technology address that concern in different ways, she says. Some grade for attendance; others include experiential activities in class that require students' presence. "We're trying to think about what lecture means and where learning occurs," she says. Lack of infrastructure. The second barrier is logisti- cal. Schools need a greater computer infrastructure to store and organize lectures in digital formats. In addi- tion, their systems must be able to set up student log-ins. Market uncertainty. Finally, Bradshaw notes that faculty often don't want to get too invested in one plat- form, in case the larger university eventually adopts a different one to use across the institution. "We're still waiting to see what happens," Bradshaw says. Some universities are moving forward to make the technology a more permanent and widely used feature on their campuses. For example, at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and Manchester, the school's academic technology group recently launched a campuswide pilot test of lecture capture. After evalu- ating several different platforms, it chose the software provider Tegrity. Faculty will continue testing the technology until August 2012. The technology group will use their feedback to determine how well the tool works on a large-scale basis. Eventually, the university plans to build several classrooms with video cameras, and several others equipped to capture audio and com- puter screen content. 68 September/October 2011 BizEd William Troy, a business lecturer at the school's Man- chester campus, has been teaching in blended formats for six years, but had not used lecture capture before the pilot test. He recently trained to use the software and will begin integrating it into his courses this fall. He adds two more concerns to Bradshaw's list. The first is concern over the loss of intellectual property rights. And the second is "the fear of forever," Troy says. That is, when a professor makes a casual remark in a traditional classroom, it most often is soon forgotten. With lecture capture, however, remarks can be online for perpetuity. However, Troy believes that when faculty are given the power and training to edit the recordings, schools can work past both these barriers.