My Educational Diatribe

So I use powerpoint for my lectures, and it is robust. I sometimes think about posting the slides online, but never have. Here is a new tool that involves the whole smash online, editing and presenting. Might be useful when it gets out of alpha testing.

Thumbstacks.com - Live presentations on the web

This is a very nice artcle by Tim Swanson about the old university model possibly becoming obsolete. He also touches upon the purpose of higher education in todays society.

Will the University Survive?

So podcasting seems to be all the rage in higher education. First it started with a few schools just broadcasting information items, but then schools such as UC-Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT started posting actual class lectures for the world to listen too.
Cool, now anyone can listen to the lecture of world-renown professors on all sorts of topics. In some classes, say philosophy or political science, that’s cool. But for a hard science such as chemistry it’s tough. And as far a useful tool for students, it falls down pretty hard. Don’t get me wrong, podcasting is better than nothing, but it has some serious drawbacks.
Podcasting weaknesses:
1. Audio (only) recordings of lectures. Students today are visual learners. They watch days worth of TV each week. Their eyes seem to receive more that their ears.
2. Whole lectures (55, 90, 120 min) make for large file sizes. These are huge files for students to download, and they might not even want the whole lecture.
3. The audio file contains pauses, breaks, discussions. When reviewing the material, the student does not want to listen to the dead air in every lecture. The time students are given to write information down, class discussions, question/answer periods drag the time out.
4. Difficult for students to find ‘right’ spot in the lecture. When students go back to the podcast for reviewing and just want to listen to the 10 minute section on a specific small topic, they have to hunt and peck for it, which gets frustrating for them.
5. Attention span of students less than 10 minutes Many studies have shown that students start to tune out of lecture after as little as a few minutes with all but teh most engaging instructor. 50 minutes lecture are a lot to slog through for an MTV generation student.

What I have begun doing is what I call ’screencasts’ (aka vcasts or vodcasts) which I content are better than podcasts for a few big reasons:

Screencasting strengths:
1. Audio and video recording of lectures ‘pieces’. I visually record myself stepping through my PowerPoint slides laying down an audio track on top. I use the same words, and examples as in lecture.
2. Files available to anyone on the planet who wants to watch and listen. Two words: Open Source
3. Short lecture segments (5-15 minutes) that cover 1~2 specific topics. These are recorded in my office (or at home) on my time and are broken up into logical pieces, containing only 1 or 2 topics. This plays in nicely to the attention span of the students
4. Recorded at ‘full speed’. There are no breaks, since I am alone talking to the computer when they are recorded. I get through the material in about 40% of the time compared toa standard lecture presentation.
5. Video gives visual reference. Students can easily follow along and see where I am at in the discussion.
6. When reviewing, students quickly find the part they are looking for. Since the files are posted and recorded by individual topic, finding the one they want to view is easy.
7. No need for expensive software or large server space. I address this elsewhere.
8. Screencasts transcend semesters. I will always teach about electroneagtivity, so I can use that screencast for multiple semesters, whereas I would have to re-record lectures each semester so as not to confuse my students.

Podcasting is new and exciting yes, but it seems like we need to take one more logical step and give our students a really powerful educational tool.

The future is also bright, with online education, distance learning, textbooks becoming moot, etc. I am just glad I am still young so I can enjoy this for a while.

This semester I have been screencasting my lectures for both first and second semester general chemistry. The students have loved it (comments and results from a poll will come soon) and they have used them as study tools as well as pre-lecture prep, without my even forcing it.

With each screencast, I was doing several things, each of which took some time…
1. Record the screencast
2. Produce the screencast into a flash file so I could post it on a ’streaming’ viewer for students who had slow connections.
3. Produce the screencast into a .mov file
4. Convert .mov file into .m4v file
5. Update the rss feed to iTunes music store so people could download .m4v file and watch on iPod or in iTunes

This took a lot of time, but I was trying to help two groups of students, those who wanted to download a local copy of the screencast and those who just wanted streaming video on the fly.

Then I found Google video, which allows me to post the .avi file to the mother Google servers. Many of the problems of the old method vanished:
- When watching the video, it ’streams’ like any other google video, which is good for slower internet speeds.
- Students can download it as an .mp4 video. It looks like Google did the conversion for me, a step that took me a while before.
- The search function works. I did a search for ‘jcc general chemistry’ and my screencasts popped up first. Also a search of ‘Ka Kw’ brought up my talk on acid and base dissociation constants. Very nice.
- I uploaded the full size version (1280 some odd pixels wide, 50 Mb in size) of the screencast and google shrunk it down to fit their size (the downloaded .mp4 file is 12 MB, for a 15 min screencast), which did not do much damage the image quality, and the file sizes are nice and small (fast loading, it took about 20 seconds to back-load my 14 minute screencast) Google converted it for me, they also shrank it (something I did before)
- No need for Camtasia ($$) at all. Camstudio (which is free!) produces .avi files that can be posted.
- Initial production time is cut way down because now I don’t have to ‘produce’ them at all. I uploaded the source file directly, let Google shrink and convert it.
- iTunes no longer needed. I can set up my own RSS feed for people to subscribe to.
- No local server space needed. These files are good sized (10-20 MB each) and I have lots of them. Now I don’t have to worry about space limits, as the files are on google.

Now, there are some bad sides:
- It takes a long (20-30 min each?) time to upload the files. I must say that I am uploading the behemoth ~50 .avi source files, however.
- It was ~36 hours from the time I loaded my first files onto the server until the video was ‘approved’ by google, so you can’t post stuff quickly. After I had loaded ~15 videos, I seem to have been ‘fast-tracked’, so now my submissions are approved much quicker.
- If you want to download a ‘windows/mac’ version of the video, you end up having to download the Goggle video player. You can not save it as an .avi or something else. You can download a .mov version that plays on a video iPod just fine (and other video compatible portable technologies in the future)
- No hope of password protecting the screencasts, although you can charge people to watch them.

Overall, I think this is fantastic. The negatives are minimized once you get a good set of videos up. It works for all people (those who want to download and those who want streaming)

You can also embed the google video right inot any webpage, including a blog, just like this:
My question is why the big guys (UC-Berkeley and MIT for example) produce their lecture videos is RealPlayer (.ram) format. Ick. You have to download a (questionable) player to view the files, and they are too big.

So I am doing long runs and I like to listen to talking instead of music when running for 2+ hours. I have been hoping for some school to come up with good lectures I can download. It MIGHT be UC- Berkeley. I subscribed to the Undergrad colloquim on Political Science which might be cool. Here is a list of all the webcasts @ Berkeley