News & Updates

Lecture Capture and Flipped Classrooms

By Ben Salzman

November 10, 2015

I vividly remember my first introduction to educational technology in the late 90s. My father read to me The New York Times article, “Adult Education; No Tests and You Can Hit Rewind”. It was a new frontier for learning. The Teaching Company, created by Thomas M. Rollins, had started producing The Great Courses series. This series offered filmed lectures designed to provide lifelong learners with an opportunity to further their education. The company promoted no grades, no tests, no homework, but what excited me the most was the ability to stop the VHS tape and rewind to review concepts I did not understand. Time and effort would be the only obstacle, that and the challenge of keeping your VCR in working order. The Great Courses began offering wonderful material such as, a “48-lecture course on How to Understand and Listen to Great Music” at a cost of $449.95. This was a rather expensive investment for the average person. To contextualize the economic climate in 1996, gas prices held around $1.19. As the series' success grew over time so did their catalogue of course offerings, taught by renowned faculty and experts, including our upcoming Great Names Speaker Neil deGrasse Tyson. His course The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries is one of my personal favorites.

Fast-forward (pun intended) to almost 20 years later, and you can find a wide-range of lecture capture solutions offered by numerous technology companies. With the rapid international growth of massive open online course (MOOC) providers, such as edX and Coursera, it is no surprise that the industry of lecture capture technology is continuing to grow. Last year an article in Campus Technology stated, “The global lecture capture market is poised to grow 24.1 percent in the next five years, from revenues of $162.0 million in 2013 to $592.2 million in 2019.”

So what lecture capture software do we currently offer at Hamilton and how is our campus utilizing it?

Our Research and Instructional Design Team provides support for an all-in-one video platform called Panopto. Created in 2007, Panopto helps academic institutions record and share video presentations easily from many different devices.

The common use of Panopto is capturing class lectures with a web camera, while simultaneously recording PowerPoint, Keynote, or other presentations on the classroom screen. A good example of this setup is this lecture Big Data and the Genome Revolution at Duke University.

One innovative pedagogical practice that Panopto can be utilized for is “flipping” a classroom. For those not familiar with the term, Educause defines a flipped classroom as: “a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions.”

Here are some flipped classroom examples:

• In this flipped classroom, Cornell University’s N. Rama Rao Professor of Computer Science Kenneth P. Birman, uses Panopto to deliver students a PowerPoint-style lecture, introducing them to high assurance cloud computing with Isis2.
• In this next example, Ari Bixhorn, Vice President of Marketing at Panopto, demonstrates how recording course material using an iPhone and laptop can flip a Biology class. Bixhorn uses a laptop and webcam to record the lecture, while his iPhone uses the Panopto Mobile app to record video through a microscope.

The use of Panopto on our campus has started to spread to Academic Resource Centers, such as the Oral Communications Center, and even student organizations like our Mock Trial Team. Panopto is currently free to departments and students across the campus. If you are interested in the software please contact bsalzman@hamilton.edu to setup up an account and demonstration.