What is lecture capture?

Lecture Capture as its name suggests is the process of recording a live lecture or pre-recording a lecture to make it available to students.

How you decide to capture a lecture will depend on your audience, the course format, and the resources you have access to.

We often hear these questions from instructors who are planning on recording their lectures for the first time:

Do I need a professional camera and/or an expensive microphone?
Do I need a whiteboard?
Do I need to record my lectures in a studio?

Our answers to these questions are always: It’s totally up to you, depending on your preference, budget, timeline, and the content you want to deliver.

Did you know?

65% of people are visual learners.

Source: Zopf R., Giabbiconi C. M., Gruber T., Müller M. M. (2004). Attentional modulation of the human somatosensory evoked potential in a trial-by-trial spatial cueing and sustained spatial attention task measured with high density 128 channels EEG. Brain Res. Cogn. Brain Res. 20 491–509. [Google Scholar]

Lecture capture tools at UMass

There are four software at UMass that could be used to capture and deliver lectures to students: Canvas Studio, EchoVideo, VoiceThread, and Zoom.

You can watch the overview of the examples and use cases of the 4 software below.

Please note that the tool mentioned in the video above, formerly known as 'Echo360', has been rebranded as 'EchoVideo'.

Canvas Studio

Canvas Studio is an online video learning platform built in Canvas, it allows instructors and students to actively collaborate through video and audio media.

EchoVideo

EchoVideo is often used for capturing live sessions and delivering lectures to students asynchronously. There are more than 20 classrooms on campus equipped with EchoVideo camera units.

VoiceThread

VoiceThread is an asynchronous interactive collaboration tool available at UMass that can be used to encourage student discussion and build community in asynchronous learning settings.

Zoom

Zoom might be everyone’s most familiar option. Many of us are using it to deliver lectures synchronously and record them for future reference.

You can explore the more explicit comparison of features and use cases among these four tools here 4.4 | Canvas Studio vs EchoVideo vs VoiceThread vs Zoom.

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