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http://www.edcenter.sdsu.edu/faculty-fellows/fall2002/pozos/eteachinfo.html
Our eTEACH Faculty Fellowship Experience So Far (January, 2003)
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eTEACH is a powerful video-based lesson creation tool for the web that is available to anyone at no cost. It is intended primarily for educators who want to extend their ability to communicate and to provide their students increased opportunities for insight and understanding. As with any powerful tool, eTEACH does come with a bit of a cost in time and effort, and requires some technological sophistication, but the rewards are great and well worth it. eTEACH was developed by Mike Litzkow and Greg Moses at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. They provide expert personal support of the product, and Greg is certainly its most experienced user. Professor Bob Pozos of San Diego State University's Department of Biology has adopted eTEACH for his introductory Biology 100 course. There are six sections of Bio 100, and Bob has about 200 students in his section. Before we detail our experiences specific to Bob's application, we'd like to provide an overview of the most important factors we've found necessary to consider when undertaking the creation of an eTEACH curriculum module. Three Major Factors There are 3 major factors to take into account when considering the development of a video-based curriculum module...
More on Video Production... Setting an appropriate scene Because of the scientific nature of most faculty we work with, lectures often include various demonstrations with props, lab equipment, etc. In the best of situations, you will have already planned your lesson thoroughly before arranging to shoot your video. However, some like to just jump right in and learn as they go. We sort of went this route, but will do our best to avoid it with future users. Often, the first place to consider videotaping is the same room in which the course or laboratory is being taught. This was not a good option for us because the room was scheduled most of the time. It's best to choose a location where you have as much control over your environment as possible, so if the door can be locked, it might be a good idea to lock it to avoid interruptions. A research laboratory where students and staff are coming in and out upredictably is a poor choice. Keep the setting as simple as possible. Limit the number of complex patterns in the background, or in people's clothing. The simpler the scene, the better video compression works. Ideally, search for production services on your campus. Typically, if you do have such facilities on your campus, they come at a cost, but see if they have space you might be able to use for free if you don't require any support or hardware. You'll probably gain from giving your students the opportunity of appearing in some of your eTEACH lessons. Students feel considerably more engaged with the video if one of their fellow students is 'on the spot' alongside the Professor trying to answer a question or assist with a lab experiment. Obtaining proper video hardware Remember that audio is as important as video when considering the purchase of your own video equipment. Typically, campus media services provide excellent technology for both audio and video, but low-end video cameras affordable on a lab budget might be lacking in hi-quality audio. Our Sony DVR PC110 was more than adequate for our needs. You may also rely on post-processing with Windows Media Encoder to enhance the vocal quality of your recordings while at the same time filtering out much of the ambient noise. Developing a narrative This step is important in order to minimize mistakes that force retakes, but is best done only if there is just one person in the scene. With two or more people interacting who are not trained professional actors, it's best to keep the interaction more spontaneous and just plan on doing numerous retakes. This was our experience, at least. At some point, it might be worth exploring recording audio and using speech to text conversion software to generate a narrative. Videotaping Learn your cameras features well. If you stop to playback what you've recorded, remember to always do an 'End Search' to cue the videotape to the endpoint of the last recording before beginning a new recording on the same videotape. Windows Media Encoder does not do well with multiple recording beginnings and endings on the same videotape. Transfer to a computer Audio/Video capture on computers has become much less painful than it used to be, but there are still so many factors to consider, it's difficult to sum them up briefly, but we will try. If possible, record on a digital video camera. This alone should make transfer to a computer which supports digital video connections such as Firewire (IEEE 1394) much easier. In Windows XP, when we make a connection between our camera and the computer, a dialog box comes up asking us what we want to do, and provides 2 useful options, one of which is to open the connection with Windows Media Encoder 9, and the other with DVD Motion, software provided with our Sony Vaio desktop pc with Firewire built-in ($800 at Fry's several months ago). Conversion to streaming format ready for eTEACH This step should be most easily done using Windows Media Encoder Series 9. Windows provides this tool free, and it provides basic functionality to output your raw (usually .avi format) digital video to a .wmv (Windows Media Video) format digital video. It's possible you are using a Mac and iMovie, or Premiere, or Final Cut Pro, etc. We began this way, because it was our most convenient access to Firewire. We learned the hard way that tranferring files larger than 2 Gb is not possible with ftp. We did have an NT Server set up with an Appleshare volume, which would have allowed me to transfer files larger than 2 Gb in principle, but in practice it got hung up at some point. So, we had two basic options, either keep our files under 2 Gb before transferring from the mac to the pc, or capture to a pc in the first place. We chose the latter, because one of us had a Sony desktop Vaio with Firewire built in. |
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More on eTEACH Authoring for Lesson Creation... eTEACH Author is perhaps the easiest part of the entire curriculum module development process. It is simple enough to learn, and the developers provide all the necessary learning tools to get you going quickly, including an eTEACH lesson on how to create an eTEACH lesson! See the "eTEACH Authoring Demo" below. Essential Resources for Learning eTEACH eTEACH Author's Manual (online)
eTEACH Authoring Tool Downloads
eTEACH Installation eTEACH Authoring Demo |
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| Installing eTEACH (and Everything else you might need...) Be prepared for many megabytes of downloading depending upon which platform you are developing your eTEACH lessons. You may ultimately need to download all of the following, some of which require a reboot: eTEACH Author (9.3 Mb) The link above to important
installation instructions provides links to whatever supplementary
files or programs you might need. Downloading and installing are
very straightforward. The online
eTEACH tutorial is an excellent way to get up to speed quickly
on eTEACH. More on eTEACH Lesson delivery... How do you really want to incorporate eTEACH into your curriculum? Do you have the luxury of basing your entire curriculum on eTEACH modules? This assumes all of your students have convenient access to computers supporting Windows Media, and that's not such a dangerous assumption to make anymore. Most colleges on most major university campuses have pc labs with current Windows OS installed, and probably support for Windows Media and a decent internet connection. Unless you're a veteran of using multimedia in your courses, it's best to start simple, perhaps by undertaking only a half dozen or so lessons per semester, and keeping them to simple review, so as not to become too critical a component upon which much of the student's grade is based. Once you gain student acceptance, then push the technology farther. Our Fellowship with Bob Pozos Bob Pozos, Professor of Biology, has adopted eTEACH for use in his Biology 100 course. This course has six sections averaging almost 200 students per section. Bob teaches one of those sections. He currently has over 200 students enrolled.
Video production often presents a variety of unanticipated challenges, the primary one being when the presenter ‘messes up’. In our situation, Bob was loaned our video camera and shot his own video. Problems included:
One unanticipated challenge was the difficulty of getting a video captured on a mac G4 and transferred to a Windows machine running eTEACH. We quickly concluded that it's best to be as self-contained as possible. Do all capturing and development on the same machine. When eTEACH projects are transferred to the Windows Media Server for public viewing, all modified files mist be transferred including whatever video the project contains. If this video is large, you will want to have a hi-speed internet connection between your capture/development machine and your server. It would probably not be wise to do your capturing and development on your server, but this would avoid problems with a slow network. We decided it would be easiest if one of us did the video capture using a pc with everything in one; Firewire, capture software, and eTEACH. We found it to be easiest to use a program that allows the user to fast forward and rewind easily through the video and set In/Out mark points for the good sections of video to be encoded as .wmv. It turns out that a great little program we happened to have for this was DVDMotion, which came with our Sony Vaio desktop to accompany the Firewire support. Microsoft provides Windows Media Encoder Series 9 for free, which works well enough, but has one or two peculiar annoyances that caused us to stick with DVDMotion for batch capture to disk in .avi format. We then used the “Convert File” option in Encoder 9 to convert .avi to .wmv. When we originally worked through this process, we were under the impression that we would need .asf format in order for our ASF Server to be able to serve streaming media. We learned from the eTEACH developers that an ASF Server will in fact serve .wmv format files. This was not apparent from any page we could easily find on Microsoft’s support site regarding this issue. Developing one’s first eTEACH lesson might also be a bit of a learning curve, but we found it very easy and predictable once we create our first one. In fact, we found this part of the process to be the easiest and most predictable. When you are ready to create your eTEACH module, have all of your files prepared and in a folder convenient to browse to. Media files such as video will be duplicated in a newly created folder by eTEACH. This might be important to keep in mind if you are developing on one workstation and ftp your files to a Windows Media Server. You need to be sure you are transferring the duplicated file in your eTEACH ‘Video’ directory, not the file you originally captured. We recommend initially evaluating how many lectures to attempt to capture, and which lectures are the most worthwhile. Make a list, and choose the top 4-6 that are spread out over a semester. Future Plans We plan to incorporate the use of video captioning for accessibility. Even though eTEACH does not provide any pedagogical framework built into its design (such as ICARE from former ECCSE Fellow Bob Hoffman), such frameworks may easily be incorporated into eTEACH. Capturing Video on a Mac For mac users, because eTEACH accepts Windows Media Video (.wmv) format, it's best to capture and transfer your files uncompressed as .avi format (raw uncompressed). We have done considerable mac-based video work in the past, and therefore we had three options on our G4 to generate this format; Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and iMovie. The original digital video was recorded with a Sony DCR-PC110 digital video camera (Mini DV format). This is a wonderful little camera we obtained in early 2002 for around $1500. FTP file transfer has a two gigabyte limit, so your .avi video files must be below this if ftp is your preferred mode of transfer to a pc.
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Bob's
initial hope was to somehow integrate eTEACH with CourseScape
documents, 'intelligent' PDF documents with the capability of
embedding quizzes right in the document. There were some problems
with this approach; the Coursescape web site required a login
and used popup windows for various parts of its navigation, which
did not work well within the eTEACH paradigm. We concluded it
was best to create versions of Bob's CourseScape documents that
would be compatible with eTEACH. After our first couple of trials,
Bob concluded that he wanted to simplify even more the documents
he used to accompany his video.
Bob
also felt strongly that he would hold his student's attention
better if he used real students in his videos. This helped engage
the students viewing the video. Bob chose students with confidence,
and tried to keep the dialog spontaneous, which led to the need
for multiple takes, but the results were well received by Bob's
students.[EdCenter
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