Academic Technology Podcast - Episode 4

Kimberly: Hello and welcome to the fourth episode of the Academic Technology Podcast. I'm Kimberly Hayworth, the manager of Academic Computing's Consulting and Multimedia Services group. Today I'll be interviewing Ed Carrier, a faculty member from the Design Group in Mechanical Engineering about screencasting. Thanks for being here today, Ed. For listeners who may not be familiar with it, can you tell us what "screencasting" is?

Ed: I've been doing this since what we're going to talk about since January of 2003 and it was only actually recently, when I was preparing a paper, that I found out that it had a name, and in fact, the name that I found was "screencasting," and in the case of the way I do it, I record both my voice as well as the images that are used on my PowerPoint presentations and all of the penstrokes that I add using my tablet. And then I make it available to the students after the class.

Kimberly: Here's a clip of a screencast that Ed uses in his courses.

Ed (Screencast Audio): The hydraulic analogy for a capacitor is a flexible diaphragm that completely separates two ends of, or two parts of a pipe. So if it's just sitting there with no pressure differential across it the flexible membrane is in some neutral position. Now if I cause a pressure to appear here what's gonna happen? It's gonna collect over there? What's gonna collect over there? The pressure. I'm gonna raise the pressure. What's gonna happen to the diaphragm? It's gonna deflect. And what's that gonna cause to happen down here? It's gonna displace some fluid. OK? So if I'm sitting here watching this fluid go by, can I tell the difference between that fluid and if I had a hole and it was just pumping fluid through? No, you can't . But the current is very different. This is a displacement current. It only happens during transience. So as soon as the we reach the point where the pressure balances with the springiness of the diaphragm, the diaphragm stops moving, and we stop displacing fluid and we stop pushing current through.

Kimberly: So, as far as how you're actually using it in your classes, can you describe more about what you're doing?

Ed: I have a tablet PC on which I'm running two pieces of software simultaneously; one is the PowerPoint that everybody's used to. The difference about using PowerPoint on a tablet PC is that not only do you have standard PowerPoint presentation tools, but I can, with a pen in a very natural way, go in and add annotations onto the slides. And one of the new things that came with tablet PC is that those annotations stay with the slide. So that if I go forward and a student asks a question about the prior slide, I can bounce back to that slide in my presentation; all of the annotation that I left there when we were working on that slide is still there, and so, that's what really made it feel, for me, more or less the same way as lecturing with an overhead, which is the way I used to lecture before. So I give my presentation with PowerPoint, but with lots of of interactive annotation. And at the same time I'm running a piece of software called Camtasia, which allows me to record my voice, synchronized with all of the activity that's going on on the screen. So, I'm using a digital projector to project my PowerPoint presentation, and so what's on my screen, all of my penstrokes—as they appear—are being recorded. And then I go back to my office, produce it into much smaller files that are suitable for streaming, and then I hand it off to the ITS folks here, who mount it on a streaming server, and give me back a link, a url, that I then post for my students to be able to use.

Kimberly: How long does that process take, to get it turned around?

Ed: The process takes a variable amount of time, depending on which computer you run it on. This is something that I've discovered. For a while I was doing the production on the same tablet PC that I was doing the recording on. And on that PC, which is, I think a 1.3 GHz processor with 512 MB of of RAM, it was taking a little more than real time. So an hour and fifty minute lecture would typically take a little over two hours to produce into a Windows Media file. I have since moved the process to my desktop PC, which, on the surface, isn't all that much faster—it's only a 2 GHz processor— but apparently much more efficient access-wise, because now those same lectures take on the order of half an hour or forty-five minutes to produce. Typically, I finish my lecture up by 3 o'clock, come back to my office, transfer the file from the tablet to the desktop PC, and start it producing. And then, I transfer that file to the ITS folks, and often I'll have the link back to post to my students by 5:00 that day. It's never been any later than early the next morning.

Kimberly: And what are the advantages of this process?

Ed: There're two advantages, or two, sort of classes of advantages. One comes just from moving to the tablet PC with an overhead projector, as opposed to overheads. And that is—it's much more visible, much clearer to the students, much brighter, bigger images, and therefore it's a lot easier for them to see what's going on. That's one thing. On the same sort of note, having moved to PowerPoint, it makes it very easy for me to produce my lecture handouts. And my style of lecture handouts really is just the bare slides. I use very, very simple images and PowerPoint slides, much like I did when I was preparing overheads manually. But before it was always a challenge to try and shrink them and get them onto reasonable-sized pages so the students could have those images and not be wasting their time trying to recopy an image that I had already predrawn, and give them some room to take notes around it. Having gone to PowerPoint, I just print the slides four up on a single sheet of paper, and so that's what the students get to take notes on.

Kimberly: You also actually make these available, like previously taught lectures, as course materials, don't you?

Ed: Yes. As I'm going through the quarter, I make those, the lectures, that I'm giving during the quarter, available. And occasionally, I will have to be out of town and can't find a way to schedule in a make-up lecture. And so I can simply give then the link to the lecture I delivered last year. The other advantage, the reason I really got into this, started when I was back teaching and did a class over SITN, the Instructional Television Network, that was, actually not the best part. The best part was, they recorded the lectures, and in talking with students, I found, they made heavy use of those recordings as they were preparing for exams, and when they found they had problems in the lab, and thought that I had covered it in lecture, but hadn't captured it in their notes. So, when I found out about that, I started looking for technologies that would let me record my lectures, but not have me have to be in a television classroom to do that. And so, I also didn't want to change my lecturing style much, which has worked very well for me for along time. And so I was kinda constantly on the lookout for getting those bits and pieces of technology to come together. And that all happened when the last piece came into playand that was the tablet PC back in Novermber of 2002. And so I started the next quarter experimenting with a few lectures and surveying the students to find out what they thought about it, got overwhelmingly positive responses, so I did it some more in another class, also got positive responses. So starting in Spring Quarter of 2003 I moved all my lectures to using this technique.

Kimberly: Could you describe some of the specific feedback?

Ed: The thing that stands out is, the first time that I did this, it was in a small, undergraduate class, and I recorded most of the lectures up to the time of the midterm, and then I put all those recordings onto CDs, and handed out the CDs with the exams as, you know, "here's a way that you can review if you need to", 'cause all of my exams are take-home, open book, open notes—I'm trying to challenge them to use the material, rather than simply regurgitate some facts. But one of the students on the free-response part of my survey wrote that this was the most amazing resource anybody had ever given them in a class. I still get lots of of positive comments. I've surveyed students a number of times now, and I think, if I remember correctly the statistics, average student reports that they review 3 to 4 lectures over the course of a quarter and most of them are reporting that they're not lectures that they missed, but lectures that they felt like they needed a second pass at in order to digest. And then, there every quarter, there have been a few students who have reported that they've watched every lecture a second time, on the recording. I suspect that for students whose native language is not English, this offers them the opportunity to go back, pause the recordings, If they don't understand something, they can drag it back and replay it, or stop and go look something up. So I think it provides an excellent resource.

Kimberly: So, as far as teaching in the classroom itself, does this also free up more time for discussion, or has it modified any of the in-class activities?

Ed: I wouldn't say that I've modified the in-class activities. But I've used this technology to prepare supplemental tutorial materials, some of which were things that I used to do in class. So, for example, I've done introductions to how to use some of the software tools that we use in my classes. And so those tutorials are now out of my lectures, and I provide them to people as recordings. And that's opened up time for me to add more examples, more small group work-on-a-problem sort of things to the actual lectures.

Kimberly: That sounds like a wonderful resource.

Ed: Thank you. I think the students like it, and I'm sold on it. Now my biggest worry is that the bulb in the projector will die right before or during class, or that I'll drop my t ablet and break it, and then, I'd be lost at that point.

Kimberly: Well, that actually brings up the next question: what are the challenges?

Ed: The biggest challenge is that you're now dependent on some technology. Before the technology was a stack of overheads, which I carried with me—probably pretty low chance of having problems with it. And there as usually one or two overhead projects floating around somewhere near any classroom, so the odds are being able to get an overhead projector that would work were very high. Now I'm dependent on the LCD projector working, and unfortunately, in the classroom in which I teach most of my classes, we've had a horrid time with short bulb life on the projector. And fortunately for me, I think it's always died the day before my lecture, and I heard about it in time to be able to go in and replace the bulb. Although we now have a portable projector that's sort of on loan for people that I can use if it turns out that I show up and the projector has died. So the dependence on technology and the fact that I'm making a recording for someone who may be watching the class after the fact has made me aware that someone who's hearing my recording isn't actually able to hear the—what the questions are that the students are asking. So in my early lectures, there were great pauses while someone was asking an elaborate question, and then my response to my question. And the person listening to the recording was left to try to wonder, "OK, what exactly did they ask?" So now I work very hard when someone asks a question, to try and paraphrase it in a concise way. And I actually think that's good for the people in the class, for the person asking the question, as well as for capturing the question for the recording.

Kimberly: So what advice do you have for faculty who'd like to try screencasting?

Ed: Just go for it. Find somebody who's got a tablet PC, almost everybody's got PowerPoint, to start with. If not, then you have to get that. But Camtasia offers a 30-day free trial that you can download, and gives you a chance to experiment with it. Like I say, I'm sold—anybody who is lecturing now with overheads, I think that they have the opportunity with very little change in their lecturing style, to move to this technology-oriented overhead, if you will, and...and improve the visibility of what they're doing with people, as well as offering the opportunity to capture so that students can actually review what they heard in class

Kimberly: Thanks so much, Ed. Faculty interested in trying screencasting are welcome to contact me, Kim Hayworth, at kimhwrth@stanford.edu, for more information about getting started with screencasting.

Well, that's it for Academic Technology Podcast, Episode 4. Thanks for listening. Episode 5 will include an interview with Kristi Wilson, a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and also the founder and co-director of the Stanford Film Lab. Links to information discussed in this podcast and other show notes are available online at acomp.stanford.edu/cams. Just click the Academic Technology Podcast link. You'll also find a link to our blog if you'd like to provide feedback or suggest topics for future podcasts.