Put your lectures only easily and for free with Panopto
I saw an impressive online course this morning using Panopto. The asynchronous videocasting was really convincing. Basically, the PowerPoint slides are synced with the video, and you can move up or down in the slide deck, with the video syncing automatically. Students can annotate your slides. You can add secondary video feeds or screen capture.
What is more is that a trusty colleague said it was really easy. You can do it on his own given a good camera. The catch is that Windows is required. The price is free or relatively cheap.
Update: See the live demo.
Reference: The November press release where Panopto announces the free version of their product.
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“Silverlight is required to use the Panopto Viewer”. Thanks, but I prefer not to substitute a standard that is available in multiple platforms by another Windows only lock-up.
Also, as an example, take a look at the lectures here:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4BBB74C7D2A1049C
and the accompanying material here:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/61b/
and decide for yourself is this service is necessary.
Comment by Jon — 1/12/2008 @ 23:14
I am not a big fan of Silverlight, but your comparison of YouTube with this tool is unfair.
Posting your lectures on YouTube is certainly possible but there are a few issues:
1) You can’t do YouTube lectures alone. You need a staff to do it. It is all fine and sweet if you have the budget, but someone filming and editing each lecture is expensive. Oh! I guess you could remote control a camera and do the editing yourself if you have nothing else to do.
2) Recording live lectures is one thing, but as your examples show, it is also a waste of student time. Prerecorded lectures can be better: why would you waste 5 minutes spelling out a URI on a blackboard when you are going to post your content online anyone? If students must go online, why explain the mysteries of your various email addresses? Just spell it out on the course site. Use the lectures for useful content.
This being said, I don’t believe video lectures are interesting. In fact, stop lecturing.
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 2/12/2008 @ 0:03
Daniel, with your permission, I thought I would weigh in here. We recommend SilverLight but it is not required for Windows users. It is required for Mac users and in that respect, it is multi-platform. We have no ax to grind in the media player wars. We support Windows Media, Silverlight, MP3 and soon MPEG4. Our system is adaptable to various encoding methods and eventually, we’ll support all major standards.
We also have no fight with YouTube in the offing. It is a powerful and broadly accepted standard in its own right. The goal of our system is to automate the process of capturing, indexing, encoding, streaming and archiving of immersive knowlege content. This is not a simple, straightforward process as you suggest - and certainly not on a campus or enterprise-wide basis. Presenters (and in particular faculty) are all too often thrust into being videographer, editor, intetgrator, streaming specialist and chief bottle washer. We make this process blindlingly simple and inexpensive - simply put.
Finally, its a poorly kept secret that no one watches hours and hours of lectures on end. That is what integrated search is for.
Thanks again.
Brad Winney
President & CEO
Panopto, Inc.
Comment by Brad Winney — 2/12/2008 @ 13:45