Tag Archives: lecture capture

Echo360 install. Choas theory in practice

By the time we wound our way through the procurement process and actually received our Echo360 appliance, I had about 3 weeks before classes started. In that time I had to do the following:

  • Registration of the appliance on network.
  • Physical install into lectern.
  • Connection and configuration of the existing AV system.
  • Camera installation and connection.
  • Training on Echo360 system.
  • Scheduling classes and recordings.
  • Integration with Sakai to allow single sign on and distribution
  • Testing.

Plenty of time!

Oh. Did I mention that I was also doing the exact same thing with a Mediasite system and the exact same deadline?

Cannonball_run

Turns out that while it was hectic, it all came together. No 80 hour weeks or anything either. Just busy. I had tremendous support and assistance from my colleagues that maintain the classroom AV systems in the learning spaces group as well as the team that manages the LMS.

For the pilot Echo360 is hosting everything for us. They take care of content distribution and they are responsible for the servers. If I had to do that as well, there’s no way I could have pulled this off.

  • Network registration is something that I’m pretty familiar with here at ND so that only took a few minutes.
  • Installation into the lectern was easy. I’m a former AV guy so I just start screwing stuff in and plugging it in. All the AV switching gear was there too so it was just a matter of adding a few cables. The biggest issue was getting the output of the sound system into the device. That required changes to be made to wiring and the Ashley processor which live in another closet. The AV guys handled that and it only took a few hours.
  • The AV programmer made a few changes to the Crestron DMPS-300 to ensure that when the projector was blanked, no content was being sent to the capture appliance.
  • Camera installation was handled by the AV guys and was just plugging in cables for me.
  • Training was pretty extensive and handled over the phone. While the UI isn’t anything to write home about, once you play with a little it becomes familiar enough. The concepts and workflow are at least easy to understand.
    • I create terms that set the start and end dates for the semester (Fall 2013, Spring 2014, etc.)
    • I create courses (Biology 10111, CSE 20111)
    • I create sections (FA14-Biology 10111)
    • I create a recording schedule for each section based on class times. (I set the start time 1 minute early and end 2 minutes after class.)
  • The LTI integration was pretty easy. Once I sat down with the Sakai admin we got my Echo implementation guy on the phone and we had one class set up in about 10 minutes. Subsequent classes take about 5 minutes.
  • I didn’t have a lot of time to do testing but the process has been very stable. Captures kick off as expected, content is uploaded and then gets encoded.

About 2 hours after class is over, students can view the recordings.

And about a week before the semester started they came out with new software (5.3) and I rolled the dice. I had them upgrade me to the newest version since there was no content and really nothing to lose. It went well and I had no issues. I’ll say it: I got lucky.

daft-punk-get-lucky-wallpaper-hd

I don’t have any experience with working in academia outside of Notre Dame but I’d say if I can do it here, surely it can be done anywhere.

Be not afraid my friends!

Who wants lecture capture and why? And who pays for it?

2 Comments

I was fortunate when I started investigating lecture capture. My boss was able to secure a fairly decent amount of funding for some initial pilots and product testing. Enough to purchase 2 pilots, some cameras and so forth. That was at the end of July. Classes started at the end of August. After about 6 weeks it was time to ask for funding for next year based on the results of the testing I had done.

Testing? Results? Conclusions?

I just started!!!

I will not allow this tiny precious life that I have breathed into existence by sheer force of will to be snuffed out by bureaucracy and administrativia!

4612735510_7dcf384416_o

Ok, perhaps it wasn’t that bad. But they did want to know how much money I would need to continue the program. That question always seemed innocent enough until they saw how much I was asking for. Then the question became “Who’s asking for this and why?” And therein lies the problem.

You see, IT started this project, not the provost. I’m fortunate to have a boss that had some vision and was able to exercise some thought leadership here. He looked around and saw that lecture capture was an area where IT needed to start making some progress rather than waiting for someone to come to us and ask for it.

Nobody asked for a Model-T. Nobody asked for an iPad. Nobody asked for New Coke. Wait. That’s a bad example but I think the point stands. We saw a product that students and faculty need, they just didn’t know it yet. We wanted to build it and be ready. For a change we wanted to be proactive as opposed to reactive.

But apparently in academia, sponsorship and “the ask” are extremely important. I’m likely to get funding for another year but it was made clear that something of this nature, even though it’s an IT related project, the funding request should be coming from the academic side, not the administrative side. Next year,we’d better have some great academic support for this service or it will wither on the vine. If the students and faculty are the ones that benefit, they should be the ones that ask for it. It makes sense and I understand it, but it makes it that much harder.

I now have a common problem in academia:

  1. I won’t get demand unless people use the system.
  2. People can’t use the system unless it exists.
  3. It won’t exist unless people demand it.

It’s a vicious cycle. I don’t have much usage of the pilot systems. Much of the usage I do have is a result of me asking people that are scheduled in the rooms where the equipment is installed if they’d be willing to participate in a pilot. It’s not like I have faculty beating on my door asking me to record their lectures for the benefit of these poor students. If I did, that would make it easy to get the funding I need.

What I need are champions for the system. People that will take this to the provost and ask them to fund it because they believe it is important and it will have demonstrable benefits to the students and the academy. The challenge is, will they do so if they are asked to pay for it?

It’s hard to get people to buy into something they can’t see. Especially when there aren’t specific metrics that can be tracked. If I had hard analytical data that showed using lecture capture systems increased GPAs by a statistically significant amount, this might be easier. As it is, I have to find people that are pretty progressive and are willing to take a risk on technology. And while Faculty are great advocates, many of them are kind of take it or leave it. Especially those with tenure that might be the most influential. I get it. This doesn’t directly benefit them. What I need are Department Chairs and Deans to really get behind this. I need them to ask their faculty to use these systems and help us build usage and demand.

And students. Oh God do I need the students. This is a technology that ultimately benefits them more than anyone else. They’re the customer. In a perfect world I could start trying to attract them to the system and build demand for the system from the bottom up. I could present this to the student government and they could go and start asking for a widespread deployment. But I can’t put myself in a position where the students are demanding a product that I can’t deliver. A poor rollout could sour the opinion and ruin the impression of the product for years.

I’ve got to build a snowball. With no snow. And no hill.

2 lecture capture systems enter, only one leaves!

After I did my evaluation of the Crestron CaptureHD and ruled it out as our primary capture device we started doing some evaluations of other products. There’s a lot of competition in this space. I’m lazy and I like to reinvent the wheel as little as possible. Fortunately we were able to piggyback on some of the great work that the Notre Dame executive education program had done about a year earlier. They had a Polycom/Accordent system that they had been running for years and was past due for replacement. They were also getting a beautiful new building and had some budget to work with. Those 2 things are a match made in heaven. Or Notre Dame. Or both.

They had whittled down the competitors to a fairly short list. Mediasite (Their eventual selection), Echo360 and Accordent. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we chose to re-evaluate their top two choices. Their use case is a little different than ours and enough time had passed that we couldn’t just pick their vendor and feel that we had done our job.

thunderdome

Does this mean that I am Tina Turner?

We wound up piloting hardware appliances from Echo360 and Mediasite. They’re in very similar classrooms that seat about 100 students. After evaluating a few cameras (a process which I will write up later), we chose the Vaddio HD-19. We chose the CCU version since it allowed for a very easy install. Simply run 3 Cat5 cables from the lectern where the capture appliance and switching gear live, back to where the camera will be placed. Mount the camera on the wall and plug it all in. It’s so easy that I did much of it myself. With the exception of the cable pulling. (I’m old and I wear nice pants to work. Sue me.)

Since the capture appliances are located in the lectern where the switching gear lives, all we needed to do was add a cable from the Crestron DMPS-300 to the capture device. The programmer had to do a little bit of programming to ensure that when the projector is blanked the capture device didn’t get content. This prevents a professor from seeing the blanked projector and then pulling up personal email or a gradebook on the PC and committing a FRPA violation. As I understand it, it only took him about an hour since he’s so talented. (One day he may read this and I’d like to stay on his good side.)

We already had Shure lapel microphones in these rooms but we had to get an output from the mixer into the capture devices. It had to be a combination of program and microphone audio so there was a little reconfiguration of the Ashley processors. One issue we have is that there’s no capability for picking up audience questions. We are considering adding a boundary or ceiling microphone to pick up these questions but it’s difficult to ensure that you don’t pick up ambient audio from HVAC systems and projector exhaust to say nothing of coughs and sneezes. It’s Indiana and roughly 6 months out of the year it’s cold and flu season.

And almost immediately after we started the pilot, we stopped calling it a pilot. Due to a combination of project management bureaucracy and our desire to keep expectations low, we started calling it a proof of concept. That was an infinitely more appropriate term since that’s really what we were doing. making sure the systems would integrate in our environment. Once we choose a vendor we’ll do an honest to goodness pilot and really try to build some demand.

Evaluating the Crestron CaptureHD

1 Comment

When I came to this group, the only lecture capture appliance they had was a Crestron CaptureHD unit installed in our large (400+) auditorium. It had been there for about a year and was used to make some test recordings but not much else. An AV tech pacing back and forth, waving at the camera and tapping the microphone isn’t a real world use case scenario so I did some testing to see if it could be viable for larger scale use at Notre Dame.

capture-hd

I used to it record one class for an entire semester. To distribute the files I had the CaptureHD box upload them to an FTP server. From there, I downloaded them to my laptop and then uploaded them to our Echo360 server (currently in pilot). It encoded the files and placed them in a course which I specified. Access to the files was provided via an LTI integration between our LMS (Sakai) and Echo360. It’s a manual process but not difficult. Not at all scalable though.

While it’s a neat product and has some promise, it’s just not ready for prime time. Here were some of the limitations I found:

  • Couldn’t integrate with our Exchange or room reservation system (Not a deal breaker)
  • It records to an SD card and then transfers the files to an FTP server but it has no support for SFTP. That didn’t make our infosec guys happy. This has recently been rectified but the firmware release that added SFTP had other issues.
  • I had numerous issues with the device:
    • Occasional lockups on boot.
    • Some firmware versions would not pull metadata from the Fusion server to which is communicates.
    • Weird issues with recording not stopping at the correct time if it was a recurring recording.
    • Difficulty in scheduling recordings on the Fusion server.
  • It records both content sources (video and content) as one video stream, not 2. That means that if you record it in PIP mode, that’s the only way you can ever watch it. No resizing the windows or swapping them. Same thing with side by side or only one type of content.
  • It can’t stream and record simultaneously.
  • No content distribution mechanism. You get the files and they can compress them on their server into a multitude of formats, but then you have to figure out what to do with them and how to secure them. Not ideal for a low-touch process in higher-ed without a lot of custom development.

If you had no other options and didn’t care about delivering the files being a manual process, this would be fine. I’m not sure it’s worth the cost but it’s certainly viable.

I love Crestron control systems and switching gear and I’m DMCE certified so don’t take this as bashing their product. This is just one of those products that’s outside their core-competency and therefore not likely to get the time and attention it needs to succeed. I bet they drop it within 2 years. That being said: I hope they prove me wrong!

The next step was evaluating other options.