Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 8 | Page 18

18 | JADE
ARTICLE #2 | 19
CARLOS TURRO, IGNACIO DESPUJOL & JAIME BUSQUETSAY ÖZEN
different setups, ranging from more expensive to less. You can use
high-end tracking cameras, so teacher are automatically tracked in
high size, high-end static cameras, focusing on the full podium and
low end static cameras, with reduced quality.
Usually camera quality is heavily dependent on the lecture hall size,
so better quality is required for larger rooms.
Recording mode: You can choose a manual start, where teachers
have to start and stop the recording or make automated recordings
for previous bookings or an external calendar system. For calendar-
based systems, organisations may choose to opt-in (record upon
request) or opt-out (record unless teacher complains).
Manual start allows teachers to control the recording, and also
spontaneous ones, while calendar-based systems usually provide
more valid recordings, since teachers don’t have to worry about
anything.
Publishing points and LMS integration: Records have to be
published somewhere for students to view. Opencast provide a
local HTML portal, but provide a great flexibility in using external
publishing points, like video portals or LMS integrations using LTI or
Single-sign-on services.
Video player enhancements: One core feature of Opencast is the
ability to enhance video content with accompanying material (slides,
transcriptions, captions, etc.), and so requires a specialized content
player. Currently there are two main choices for his: The official
Theodul player and the alternative Paella player (Paella, 2016).
Opencast deployment for Lecture Capture at UPV
UPV history with Opencast began with a Lecture Recording pilot
in the last semester of the 2011-2012 academic year recording in
nine classrooms with 15 teachers, with 400 hours recorded. The
production phase started in 2012/2013 and this year we have 67
lecture rooms, and we are recording around 5000 hours a year, with
around 400 teachers involved. The local nickname of this project in
Spanish is “Videoapuntes”.
We chose to go for the opt-in automatic recording mode of
Opencast, so the installation of this equipment has been designed
to be as unobtrusive as possible to avoid the distraction of teachers.
We use a ceiling microphone system that does not require teachers
to wear anything. Teachers access the University calendar system to
A CASE STUDY IN LARGE SCALE VIDEO RECORDING USING OPENCAST
book a recording and the recording appear on the Sakai LMS upon
completion.
Once uploaded to the LMS, the teacher has four days to review the
recording, trim the start and the end, if necessary, and publish it
using a web tool that is also available.
Finally the recording appears under the resources section on the
course site. Only students pertaining to that course are able to access
to those recorded lectures. This is done by using and integration
with the University’s authentication system and also allows us to
know who and when has accessed a particular lecture. We use, and
plan to use more, that data for usage studies and Learning Analytics.
Opencast deployment for fast in-studio recordings
Together with the Opencast core, UPV installed 6 small recording
studios for higher quality recordings. Those recordings are meant
for the usage in Blended and Flipped teaching projects and also for
MOOC production. The local nickname for that service is Polimedia
(Turro et al, 2010).
Thus, the Polimedia service allow UPV lecturers to record pre-
prepared mini lectures to be used by students as a supplement
to the traditional live lecture or in any other pedagogical content.
For the most part they consist of concise overviews of a given
topic and have a typical duration of around ten minutes. They are
also accompanied by time-aligned presentation slides, or a time-
synchronous live screen capture.
The production process for Polimedia videos has been carefully
designed to achieve both a high rate of production and an output
quality comparable to that of a television production, but at a lower
cost, being a key feature of that the live editing, so records are
available just upon finishing (plus a small automatic processing time
in Opencast).
A Polimedia studio consists of a 4x4 square meters room with a
white backdrop, video camera, capture station, pocket microphone,
lighting and AV equipment including a computer to capture and mix
the video and audio noise gate.
Currently we have recorded more than 16.000 videos form more
than 1.800 different teachers, and they are available in UPV’s media
portal (MediaUPV, 2016).