Just a quick introductory post to effectively where I am, what I’m working on and a little bit of history.

My name is Charles Barbour. I’ve been working at ND for almost 6 years. I spent the first 5 years at the Mendoza College of Business as an Educational Technologist. That term has many meanings but in my case, it really was focused on the technology. These are a few of the things that I was responsible for:

• Classroom AV systems
• 200+ Computers
• Building computer images
• Video conferencing
• Frontline support for our LMS
• Student technology orientations
• Student printing
• Event support for lectures and guest speakers

It was a great job and was a great introduction to academia. Most of my job involved working closely with graduate and undergraduate students and faculty so I have a really clear understanding of the needs of all the groups.

About a year ago I switched jobs and came to work for Notre Dame’s main IT group, OIT. I was hired by the learning spaces group to work on lecture capture. Previously very little had been done to come up with any sort of comprehensive strategy or program. Basically it was all a completely manual process with 2 great videographers and a few students running from class to class with video cameras. Then they edited the files, encoded them and uploaded them to various systems. That’s obviously not scalable.

My job was to come up with some recommendations, see if it was possible, and do some testing. More on that in the next post.