What did the professor say?

The New York Times had a most intriguing article today, What did the professor say? Check your iPod, by Anne Eisenberg. A number of universities (University of Central Florida; Santa Clara University, CA; Purdue University; El Centro College, Dallas; Kansas State University) are using or planning to use software for recording a professor's lectures and making it available to students on their iPods.

The software for recording that "captures the words of classroom lectures and syncs them with the digital images used during the talk--usually PowerPoint slides and animations" is offered by at least two companies: Tegrity and Echo360. Each web site lists colleges/universities that are their clients (Tegrity claims over 400 educational institutions world wide; Echo360's customer list).

In the New York Times article, they spoke with people at Purdue who were using Echo360. Their web site lists MIT, Princeton, Brandeis, St. John's University, and Stanford among their customers.

On the Tegrity web site, Blackboard is listed as one of their partners with this comment:

Blackboard is allied with Technology Partner Tegrity to enhance the online education experience for institutions, administrators, instructors, and students. Tegrity products complement and enhance the Blackboard suite of products, and Tegrity-generated class recordings and e-learning content is seamlessly integrated into Blackboard courses.

In a news article, the following is said:

Blackboard provides the e-Learning platform used by colleges and universities across the country and abroad. For more than a decade, Tegrity's technology has enabled educational institutions to automatically record every class on campus and deliver them online for students to access. Together Blackboard and Tegrity will enable greater access to educational resources and content providing significant convenience and flexibility to the members of academic institutions around the world.

How Tegrity's Blackboard Building Block Works - Podcasts Automatically Created from Class

Tegrity Podcast setup starts at the beginning of the semester as the Tegrity Campus Blackboard Building Block adds a podcast subscription button in every Blackboard course and sends a personalized email to students with a one-click link for subscribing to their podcasts using iTunes.

During class, instructors press one button to start and stop recording and the software automatically creates visual podcasts broken down by chapter, that are automatically uploaded after class to the right place on the Tegrity Server. The Tegrity Campus Blackboard Building Block component uses information already available in the Blackboard Learning System to automatically catalogue the recordings by course. While listening to their podcasts, students can easily navigate to specific parts (chapters) of their class and get right to the information they need.

Blackboard administrators and other stakeholders in the institution can use the Tegrity Campus governance component to track usage, observing how students effortlessly take advantage of more instruction hours without burdening institution staff.

More to come . . .