Google never ceases to amaze me. 3 days ago I sent an email to my colleagues in architecture directing them to a 3D laser scanning tool. You hold a wand and it waves around on a spring. You wear a backpack where some of the equipment lives. They demonstrated using it in the Tower of Pisa.

Today Google announces something similar that is the size of a cell phone.

Project Tango

Apparently Johnny Lee is working for them now. I first heard of him back in 2008 when he used to do some pretty incredible stuff with Wiimote hacking.

http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/

Damn it Google! Why do you tantalize me with such cool stuff?

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?

Great short video about the technology that some grad students are using at Georgetown to study and stay organized. A couple are pretty innovative and there was at least one app I’d never heard about.

Video: Tech Tools Students Say They Can’t Live Without – Wired Campus – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Not surprisingly, the issue of intellectual property and ownership of the resulting content is a thorny issue. And truthfully, this is one we have to address even if we don’t deploy a lot of lecture capture. We already have people videotaping classes for faculty. Notre Dame has a fairly well defined IP policy as it relates to instructional content which can be found here: Notre Dame IP Policy

But the devil is in the details. To sum up the way the policy is written, if “substantial use of University facilities and resources” were used, “the tangible works developed (i.e. the website or the video production) are owned by the University, while the creator maintains ownership of the underlying creative content of the materials.” If not, the materials are owned by the creator.

What constitutes substantial?

The debate revolves around whether “substantial use of University facilities or resources (e.g., video production, web-casting, or teleconferencing facilities)” were used to create the content. Five years ago if you wanted to do a video conference you were going to need a Polycom system. Now you can do the same thing with a Google hangout or Skype. The application of that policy can be interpreted much differently today than 5 years ago.

In my case, where does lecture capture fit into that policy? If the infrastructure is there and we’re paying for the service, you can create some very high quality content with little or no input and assistance from me besides the initial training I’d give you at the beginning of the semester. It costs us little or nothing to provide that service, yet it might appear that Notre Dame would retain some ownership of the content based upon one interpretation.

Specific examples are needed here and I suspect the document will need to be updated more frequently than in the past. As the barrier to entry gets lowered, the resources required may no longer be an appropriate yardstick by which to judge ownership. Intent and purpose may be a better guideline.

So exactly what can they do with it?

Assuming the university does have some rights to this content, how can they use it? Could they use the recorded lectures and a TA to teach the class without your involvement? Can they make a MOOC? Could portions of it be re-used in another course? Again, I’d like to see specific agreements about what the university will or will not .

But that’s just one aspect of this issue.

What about student rights? If they appear in the videos, what are their rights? Do we need to get signed releases if we want to re-use the content for an online course? What accommodations need to be made for students that don’t wish to be recorded? Should they be provided with beekeeper hats?

Similar questions arise for events which are open to the public. Do they have rights or need to be notified?

What if a student records a class for review? Who owns that content?

I don’t have any of these answers. I’ve asked our Chief Academic Digital Officer and our General Counsel to come up with some guidelines. They asked me to come up with as many use case scenarios as possible. I’ve done that and it can be found here: Use Case Scenarios.

The list is surely not exhaustive. Please feel free to use and share it. If you have suggestions for improvements or any other input, please let me know.