Monthly Archives: June 2010

James Morrison on Lecture Capture

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The Curricular Technology team organized a number of sessions with faculty innovators to find how they were using technology (see: Presentations by Faculty Innovators).  More recently, the team invited James Morrison, Assistant Professor of Political Science, to do a presentation on how he creates podcasts of his lectures.

Prof. Morrison uses a USB-powered label mic that he plugs into his laptop.  He is currently using GarageBand to record audio.  Typically, he’ll make a copy of a previous lecture podcast to preserve the metadata and intro and outro audio.   When he’s done recording a class lecture, he can then simply update the title, date and description and adjust the positioning of outro audio.  The audio file can then be exported and uploaded to his course site.

Here are links to some of his podcasts:

International Political Economy (Fall 09)
International Politics (Spring 2010)

CTLR Pedagogy Series: Course Management

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Shel Sax, the Director of Educational Technology, Mike Roy, the Dean of Library and Information Services (LIS) and myself in my role as the Leader of the Curricular Technology Team, did a presentation on the Segue from Segue project at a Center for Teaching, Learning and Research (CTLR) Pedagogy Series workshop on “Course Management: Where We Are and Where We’re Going.”

Segue from Segue

Shel gave an overview of why LIS decided to discontinue development of Segue, explaining that Middlebury no longer

had the resources to continue its development and that there are now many platforms on the market that provide similar features and functionality.

I discussed how we planned to phase out Segue, and our plans to develop migration tools that would allow people to easily migrate their sites to other platforms.  I also discussed how we planned to determine what technologies the Middlebury community needed for teaching, learning and research, describing our usage analysis, focus groups and surveys.

Mike gave an overview of strategies for deciding what kinds of platforms to consider, focusing on “all-in-one” vs “best-of-breed” platforms.

All of us then presented various platforms that are being considered as alternatives to Segue including:

Course Hub

I wrapped up the workshop with a description of the Curricular Technology team’s current proposal, that of a “course hub.”  Essentially, the course hub as we envision it, would be a course site that is automatically created for all courses with basic course information such as course title, description, instructor, schedule and location.

This basic course hub site would also include a very simple user interface (UI) for adding a syllabus and/or additional pages.  We would then add to this hub a simple UI for creating additional resources in other platforms such as WordPress, Moodle, MediaWiki or Google Sites.  This UI would initiate a web service that would create the resource in the “connected” platform and create a link to that resource, as well as a feed of its recent activity.

The reaction of faculty participating in this workshop was quite positive.  Many felt the course hub idea providing a simple way for any faculty to ensure a web presence for their course while also allowing them a number of options for adding additional resources.