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> What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary ma

> What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries. I've actually been giving this a lot of thought recently, and I'm now convinced of a few things. First, lectures can and should become computerized. This needs to happen. Second, a simple video stream isn't going to cut it. What you want is several streams of various media: * A video of someone talking, gesturing, maybe writing something on a markerboard. This needs a certain amount of quality, depending on the lecture. You could record it at a high resolution and distribute reasonable-quality H.264 videos, and that should take care of it. * Slides. Darn near everybody has PowerPoint these days, or something similar. Whatever they use, it can generally be coerced into PDF format. How you actually send out the slides to viewers is a separate matter -- you might render them to PNG on your server so they don't have to fire up PDF software locally -- but you should have slides in a clear format that doesn't depend on a video stream being intelligible. No more "shaky camera looking at a projector screen" crap. Even Google Tech Talks has this problem, because they're still hampered by the just-a-video-stream model. * Table of contents. Have an outline of the subjects covered, so that people can skip around in the lecture and watch it out of order. It's the Internet way! * Supplementary material, as HTML. If the speaker is talking about TRIACs, have a link to the Wikipedia page on TRIACs in the slides. Have all links from the slides open up in a new tab, and have the browser window (or an iframe, or whatever) be alongside the video stream. This would be crazy nonlinear, but that's a good thing. * On the subject of tabbed browsing: have an equivalent of it for watching lecture videos. When the user opens up a new tab, pause the tab they were watching and duplicate all its state in a new tab. This way people can watch multiple parts of the same lecture (or, hell, even different lectures) at the same time. Remember the Wikipedia effect? Here's a succinct summary: http://xkcd.com/214/ http://xkcd.com/214/ People will literally click around reading wikipedia pages for hours, but that just wouldn't happen without the extremely interlinked, hypertextual, ADD-inducing format of Wikipedia. Imagine what school would be like if lectures could be made minimally painful like that. And of course you would want to make all the content available in multiple ways. Maybe have a desktop program for maximum slickness, a Flash-and-HTML version for people wanting quick web-based enlightenment, and an Android-based version for cell phones with a revamped UI.

netcan 18y ago
I think your on the right train of thought. A sign that things are working out would be a lecture not being recognisable a lecture. But really, I was just think along a more basic line. A way to take in a lecture & (quickly & easily) produce a web-video based documentary. IE take a lecture. Slap the notes legibly on a split screen & let users to jump around via a table of content. Links could be good. Maybe even sprinkle in some stock photos or stock video to break up the monotony of staring at a lecturer for an hour.
- sketerpot 18y ago
  We're on the same wavelength. If this is to catch on, it should be easy enough for someone to just jump in and make some content without reading the manual. That's a big challenge in its own right: how much multimedia editing functionality can you make trivially obvious?
  - netcan 18y ago
    I imagine that would depend on how limited what you are trying to achieve is. You could make it pretty easy if all it did was cut up a lecture into parts (table of contents) & annotated it.
- aci 18y ago
  I've seen a simple implementation, with a splitscreen and a table of content based on the slides here: http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ The ability to see the slides on the split screen and jump to previous slides via the table of contents really helped me as a user much.
  - sketerpot 18y ago
    That is a clunky version of exactly what I'm talking about. Awesome.
- madtownhacker 18y ago
  I used to work for a medical school where my primary job was automating the information capture (video and slides) of lectures. We had numerous lectures going on every day and only one or two people to post-produce the videos. One of the big problems we faced was the large variety of inputs: cameras, Powerpoints, writing surfaces, DVDs, etc. Professors couldn't be bothered to standardize on a single presentation format and would sometimes wait days after initially presenting to provide the slides for us to include with the captured content. I started working on a solution that would hack into the VGA signal feeding the projector and capture stills on a regular basis so at the end of the class, we'd have both the video AND the contents of the presentation. The problem with that was that it wouldn't capture full motion video, like when instructors displayed video through the projector, or had powerpoint slides with video embedded in them. My next idea was to capture images of the VGA input at 30 fps, analyze the difference between the current frame and the previous few, and make a determination if a region of the image was displaying full-motion video (if so, I'd send that region to an encoder, then subsequently overlay it on top of the high-resolution stills when displaying it to the students online). I took another job before finishing work on that idea, and since then the medical school purchased MediaSite Live from Sonic Foundry, which I think does a pretty decent job (not as cool as my idea, but workable).

netcan 18y ago

I think your on the right train of thought. A sign that things are working out would be a lecture not being recognisable a lecture. But really, I was just think along a more basic line. A way to take in a lecture & (quickly & easily) produce a web-video based documentary. IE take a lecture. Slap the notes legibly on a split screen & let users to jump around via a table of content. Links could be good. Maybe even sprinkle in some stock photos or stock video to break up the monotony of staring at a lecturer for an hour.

sketerpot 18y ago
We're on the same wavelength. If this is to catch on, it should be easy enough for someone to just jump in and make some content without reading the manual. That's a big challenge in its own right: how much multimedia editing functionality can you make trivially obvious?
- netcan 18y ago
  I imagine that would depend on how limited what you are trying to achieve is. You could make it pretty easy if all it did was cut up a lecture into parts (table of contents) & annotated it.
aci 18y ago
I've seen a simple implementation, with a splitscreen and a table of content based on the slides here: http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ The ability to see the slides on the split screen and jump to previous slides via the table of contents really helped me as a user much.
- sketerpot 18y ago
  That is a clunky version of exactly what I'm talking about. Awesome.
madtownhacker 18y ago
I used to work for a medical school where my primary job was automating the information capture (video and slides) of lectures. We had numerous lectures going on every day and only one or two people to post-produce the videos. One of the big problems we faced was the large variety of inputs: cameras, Powerpoints, writing surfaces, DVDs, etc. Professors couldn't be bothered to standardize on a single presentation format and would sometimes wait days after initially presenting to provide the slides for us to include with the captured content. I started working on a solution that would hack into the VGA signal feeding the projector and capture stills on a regular basis so at the end of the class, we'd have both the video AND the contents of the presentation. The problem with that was that it wouldn't capture full motion video, like when instructors displayed video through the projector, or had powerpoint slides with video embedded in them. My next idea was to capture images of the VGA input at 30 fps, analyze the difference between the current frame and the previous few, and make a determination if a region of the image was displaying full-motion video (if so, I'd send that region to an encoder, then subsequently overlay it on top of the high-resolution stills when displaying it to the students online). I took another job before finishing work on that idea, and since then the medical school purchased MediaSite Live from Sonic Foundry, which I think does a pretty decent job (not as cool as my idea, but workable).