Will there ever be another educational technology that lasts as long as the chalkboard? According to wikipedia, we’re going on close to 500 years. 500! If it’s still in use in 100 years, go ahead and kill me. Again.

While reading The Talk Tech With Me Daily curated by Katie Ritter, I stumbled upon an article about 8 education tools going away. Chalkboards are number 3 on the list.

Blackboards gave way to whiteboards, and now, those have been replaced by Smartscreens. They’re interactive, touch-sensitive, can be saved or erased with a touch.

And there’s no chalk dust.

Face it. When was the last time you saw a chalkboard?

When was the last time I saw one? 20 minutes ago. We have them in every one of the 80+ classrooms in this building. They’re pervasive in higher ed. About 8 years ago we built a new science building and installed white boards. Within a few months faculty revolted and they were removed and replaced with chalkboards. (At what I can only imagine must have been great expense.)

I hate chalkboards They’re dusty, dirty, look bad at the end of the day and it’s hard to capture video of them and make it legible.

That being said, they are about 1000 times better than whiteboards for the classroom and they’re the least bad alternative. (Again, least bad.)

• Better contrast. White on black or green vs a dried-up marker on a white board at 75 feet is no contest.
• No glare from ambient lights (easier to capture on camera)
• No dry markers
• When people accidentally write on the white projector screen with chalk, I don’t feel the need to stab them in the eye.

What what about the other options Mr. Smartypants?

Smartboards are a cruel joke. The software sucks. Universally. The newest iteration of the biggest market player’s software can bring machines with even the latest i7 processors to a crawl. Their utility is debateable. Sure, you can annotate on top of things on the screen. Of course you can also do the same thing with an Intuos tablet that costs $80.

You can save screenshots but I can take and email pictures with my phone faster.

Every one I’ve seen installed here on campus has been ripped out because nobody was using it. They use it as a white board. After the new cool factor wears out the cost benefit analysis of actually using them makes them more of a liability. If you’re forcing yourself to use the tool, it likely doesn’t have much merit.

Document cameras are great and I love them. Unfortunately they don’t provide enough visible board space.

What I see faculty doing is filling a whole chalkboard full of equations and trying to never erase anything. Sometimes multiple boards are filled. Then they refer back to something they had written 20 minutes ago. Try doing that with a doc cam.

You have somewhere on the order of  80 square feet of space in a small classroom with one board. In a large room with multiple sliding boards you might have 6 times that amount of space. 480 square feet!

I’m an AV nerd. I can’t come up with a viable technology replacement for chalkboards in academia that isn’t going to require multiple expensive projectors and $50,000 in AV switching gear. None of which will last 20 years. The projectors will need new bulbs every year. Faculty would need training. The whole solution sucks.

Here’s a short list of the many benefits chalkboards offer:

• Cost. They’re cheap compared to anything else. Especially over their 20 year life span.
• Cheap supplies.
• Chalk. Always. Works. (Ever have to reboot a piece of chalk? Didn’t think so.)
• Lots of screen real estate.
• Accepts input as quickly as you can write.
• Familiar. No training necessary. Nor will there be any for the next 50 years. Compare that to a smartboard or annotation software with a new UI every 2 years.

I’m sure one day there will be a viable alternative in academia. That day is not near. I bet it’s still 50 years before we see it. On that day, I will not shed a tear.

Running Presentations with De Mobo – ProfHacker – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

De Mobo allows you to control a Google Presentation, Pandora or YouTube from your smartphone.  Something like this sounds really cool but I need to test this on our network here. WiFi is on a different subnet than the classroom computers so I’m not sure if they will be able to talk to one another. My guess is no.

I’m not sure if this tool would be nearly as useful or necessary if something like AppleTV were available or if you had a wireless keyboard and mouse. Regardless, it may be worth checking out!

Excellent article on the history of some of the challenges now facing higher education.

This section in particular strikes home:

Those of us in the traditional academy could have a hand in shaping that future, but doing so will require us to relax our obsessive focus on elite students, institutions, and faculty. It will require us to stop regarding ourselves as irreplaceable occupiers of sacred roles, and start regarding ourselves as people who do several jobs society needs done, only one of which is creating new knowledge.

I’m fortunate to work at elite university that doesn’t face the same challenges at much of the market, but I fear even its days are numbered.

» The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age Clay Shirky.

As I speak with faculty and approach them about using lecture capture, one issue comes up every time.

 Students will skip class more.

See, here’s the summary of everything I’ve read on the topic.

The availability of lecture capture doesn’t significantly impact class attendance.

I’m no fool. An 8AM Monday morning class in the dead of winter may have a few less people if it’s being recorded. But will it have a statistical impact over the course of the semester? Nope.

Research done at other universities confirms this. Our pilot confirms this. Students surveys show that they feel that it is not a suitable replacement for coming to class.  I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that suggests students pay attention in class more since they don’t have to take notes so furiously.

What’s lecture capture good for?

Lecture capture is great for when you miss class or want to review material but it’s not great for primary introduction to material. Certainly not as good as actually being there. Students have a hard enough time paying attention to a 5 minute youtube video let alone watching an entire class. If your plan is to skip class and just watch the videos, you’re gonna need another plan.

Obviously I have a completely different perspective than faculty.

• I’m not judged on class attendance.
• I don’t have to worry about my contract being renewed.
• I don’t have to worry about tenure.
• I don’t have to worry about instructor feedback.

But let’s assume for a minute that there is some percentage of the student body that would skip class more. Here are some questions I have about the resistance:

• What about the students that have to miss class due to illness? It seems like you’re letting the actions of a few poor students impact those that really need the service.
• What about student athletes? This could be a tremendous benefit to them and ease the burden for both of you.
• Should students be treated as adults or children?
• Do you have an attendance policy in your syllabus?

I think those are valid questions, but again, I don’t have that same perspective as a faculty. I am likely missing a lot of those concerns.

I understand that there are other reasons and objections.

• Maybe you don’t want to censor yourself in class.
• Maybe you want students to feel free to speak openly.
• Maybe you have a phobia.
• I don’t know.

This is where it might get touchy…

But with respect to this one question of attendance here’s my biggest question: I realize it might be very sensitive and ruffle some feathers. I’m not trying to be insensitive or rude when I ask it. Keep that in mind.

Here goes:

If the recorded class experience is the same as the in class experience, what value is added by your instruction and why should students actually attend class?

A colleague from another university also made the following statement:

“If faculty do not add significant pedagogical value to the live component of a lecture then they are using outdated teaching methods.”

I’m not sure you can go quite that far. At least not in all cases. It’s pretty tough to be an innovative instructor when you have more than 250 students in a classroom. Sure it can be done but it’s the exception rather than the rule. I can’t even begin to imagine the amount effort involved.

When I try to look at it through the eyes of an instructor, I think I understand many of their fears. I also see a much larger issue though.

In this age of online learning and distance education if watching your class is the same as attending your class, I think you’re in danger of being replaced. Not allowing your class to be recorded does nothing to address that issue.

Could another professor be brought in via video conference? Could students be watching a video from another university? With Google Glass and iPhones, are students recording your class already?

Perhaps not now. Perhaps not here at Notre Dame. But in 5 years? 10 years?

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it. – Lou Holtz

It seems like higher education is changing rapidly. Adaption for both institutions and faculty is mandatory. Some will need to change more quickly than others. At Purdue they are doing a redesign of their entire curriculum and are trying to flip 50 courses a year. Many of them use lecture capture to accomplish some of that.

If lecture capture were mandated by your administration, would you embrace it? Would you look at it as a chance to do something new or would you do it reluctantly and try to ignore it as much as possible?

But you tell me. What am I missing and what would it take to convince you?

In our lecture capture pilot, 2 of the instructors made extensive use of the chalkboard. Truth be told, many faculty still use them. If we want that to be useful for review we need a camera that can capture the detail on the board.

After getting over the shock of trying to use thousands of dollars and 21st century high-tech gadgets to capture a technology that has been in use for almost 500 years, the search began.

The best location for the camera is generally going to be along a line perpendicular to the chalkboard and vertically centered along the height of the chalkboard. Unfortunately we were installing these systems in rooms that are tiered pretty steeply. Mounting the camera on the back wall means you’re shooting down at the board. Side wall mounting is out due to the angles.  The projector is pole mounted in the center of the room and I could pole mount the camera next to it but the angle is going to be steeper and now I might have some vibration wobble. (Mounting it on a desk is out due to cabling issues, possibility of tampering, and not being able to give up a seat in the room.

The least bad location is in the back of the room roughly centered with the board. Don’t you love making decisions like that? The camera is about 10 feet above the top of the chalkboard. The rear wall of the room is about 50 feet away from the chalkboard.

That gives us some requirements for the camera:

• Must be HD. (720p minimum otherwise we won’t be able to read the board)
• Must have zoom but PTZ is a plus.
• Due to our necessity to capture the blackboard, good low light performance is strongly desired. (Reduces visual noise.)
• We’d prefer to not have to have power installed at the camera mounting location since facilities requests aren’t cheap or fast.
• We’d like it to be accessible via a web page to allow remote control and monitoring.
• I’m not gonna spend more than $5K.

I got 5 out of 6. I’ll take it!

Go with what you know

I like to stick with vendors and products I have used in the past. Call me crazy. At Notre Dame we have some  Sony and Vaddio cameras in use here on campus in a number of locations so we took a hard look at their products. Unfortunately the only Sony models in our price range that met our needs had a few issues.

• They would have required power installed in the back of the room.
• We’d need to run a coax cable since it was HD-SDI output. (I don’t know about you, but I just feel funny about running coax in 2014.
• SDI Output.

What was the nail in the coffin was that SDI output. The Echo360 takes a DVI input. What that meant was that I would need a converter to take the SDI signal and convert it to HDMI and then I’d use an HDMI to DVI cable. It’s completely reasonable but there were better options.

Vaddio makes a series of cameras with a 1U Camera Control Unit box that mounts in the lectern that allow really easy installation. You run 3 cat5e cables up to 500 feet in length and those 3 cables provide power and control and the third one sends video back to the CCU. No installing power at the camera.

The CCU unit provides simultaneous HD-SDI, HDMI and composite outputs. Eventually we may connect the CCU to our Crestron DMPS-300 and program the touchpanels to allow faculty to reposition the camera to various presets, possibly with a live preview on the touchpanel. The only thing they don’t provide is the ability to view and control the camera via the web. That’s something we can work around using the remote monitoring and preview capabilities of the lecture capture systems. Once they’re connected to the Crestron system, we can also use an XPanel (a virtual touchpanel) to remotely operate the touchpanel which would give us camera control. Not ideal but workable. Most of the time the camera will be in a fixed position so this shouldn’t be needed much.

It’s all just noise to me

When we ordered the 2 best Vaddio options available were the HD-19 and the HD-20. I think the HD-22 had been announced but was not shipping. The HD-20 has better resolution and a 20X optical zoom as opposed to 19X,but the low light performance was not as good. In the attached screen captures you can see the noise difference between the 2 units.

The lighting is the same, capture system is the same, both are set to 720p output. I tried to correct for all the variables possible.

To me there is simply no comparison. If you need to record a chalkboard and you don’t have studio quality lighting, the HD-19 is clearly a better camera. I’m not sure even studio lighting would make them comparable. I’d love to look at the H-22 at some point in the future and do another comparison since it’s supposed to have great low light performance. At a little over $4000, it’s not too expensive either when you consider the ease of installation and performance.

Here’s a shot from an actual classroom capture after it’s been run through the Echo360 encoding process. I’d say it’s more than sufficient.

We’re also evaluating the Zoomshot for areas where Pan and Tilt are not required. Annoyingly enough, the control box for that unit does connect to the network and allow a live preview and zoom and focus control. It also has a USB output so you can connect it to a PC and use it as a web cam. It also does streaming from the box.

Hopefully this is helpful to someone else looking to purchase cameras in the future. If Vaddio’s not on your list of cameras to eval, you’re making a mistake.