Students staring at their iPod screens may be taking a break with a music video — or they may be reviewing a tough chemistry lecture.These days, students who miss an important point the first time have a second chance. After class, they can pipe the lecture to their laptops or MP3 players and hear it again while looking at the slides that illustrate the talk.
At least two companies now sell software to universities and other institutions that captures the words of classroom lectures and syncs them with the digital images used during the talk — usually PowerPoint slides and animations.
The illustrated lectures are stored on a server so that students can retrieve them and replay the content on the bus ride home, clicking along to the exact section they need to review.
When it’s time to cram, the replay services beat listening to a cassette recording of a class, said Nicole Engelbert, an analyst at Datamonitor, a marketing research company in New York.
“Students already have an iPod and they already use them all the time,” she said. “You don’t need to train them.”
Professors who know less than their students do about MP3 players won’t be at a disadvantage, because the systems require little technical skill to operate.
“The best lecture-capture solutions simply require the speaker to turn on a mike and push a button to start the recording,” she said. “They are simple to use.”
Long before audio files, of course, students were doing “lecture capture” by taking notes, but even rapid writers may fall behind in fast-spoken, highly detailed deliveries.
The new technology may help some of these students, especially those in large lecture classes. “But it doesn’t necessarily make sense for all groups,” Ms. Engelbert said, “for instance, in a more collaborative environment like an advanced composition class with a lot of discussion.”
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What could you be recording and redistributing for the iPod?
Photo by Tegrity.
Mark @ TheLocoMono on December 13th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
This is a terrific idea. It would present something of a challenge for deaf students because of the visual language dependency in a classroom environment.
I am sure there is a way to maximize this feature for deaf students. The question is on what handheld device though because iPod doesn’t encourage close captioning which may present some difficulty.