Maintaining lecture capture content isn’t cheap. If you use hardware to capture both content and video at high resolution and frame rates, you can easily be looking at 700MB-1GB per hour of content. For a full semester it’s somewhere that’s somewhere on the order of 40GB. That assumes that you delete the master files that are recorded and used for the encoding. (Obviously software captures that only do audio and the computer are much smaller.)

In our small pilot this semester with only 2 systems running, we have 10 courses being captured. That means roughly 400GB of content this semester. Enterprise grade storage here costs $1000 per TB. That includes backups and disaster recovery but still. That’s a lot of money.

Back of the envelope time

Let’s do some logical estimation and some quick and dirty math.

Let’s say we decide to keep content for 2 years. And let’s pretend we outfit 10 rooms with recording capability. There are about 12 courses per room each semester. Assume half of them use the system.  10 rooms x 6 courses x 40GB = 2.4TB.

$2400.

Just for the storage.

For a year.

Next year it would be double that. Then triple in year three where it should stabilize since we can now begin deleting content. $7200/year just in storage costs. If you delete it after one year you’re saving $4800. Now imagine you scale up lecture capture and need maybe double that amount.

Is that an astonishing amount of money to a university? No. But is that the best use of university resources? I’m supposed to be a good steward of those resources and I can’t justify that cost.

You tell me, how many years would you store something that nobody is likely to re-watch? That’s the real question.

What’s the value of keeping this stuff around? Currently we turn off student access to a course in Sakai just a few weeks after the semester. Can’t we do the same thing with run of the mill instructional video content? Or is there some historic benefit that I’m missing.

Many universities keep the content for 2-4 years. I can’t imagine doing that. Perhaps lectures that have some value to the intellectual life of the university, but not a third copy of Econ101 which will be taught again next year.

I’m sure if I asked someone if they wanted it kept, many would say yes. If I then ask them for their account number to charge the $40/year to, the response will be much different.

We plan to have a vendor host all of our content but the same sorts of costs apply and the same issues arise. What do you save, how long do you save it and who pays for it? How do you keep it organized?

So here’s a question:

Does anyone have statistics on how much content is viewed after the class is over or if it’s ever touched?