Once limited to a few college classrooms equipped with dedicated audio and visual equipment, lecture capture technologies have evolved to let instructors record course-related video just about anywhere.
Today many auditoriums and classrooms on college campuses are set up to make lecture capture simple. Nearly all of the audio and visual equipment in these spaces is possible to preset for easy, one-touch (or even zero-touch) lecture recording — enabling teachers to just walk in, press record, and start teaching.
Lecture Notes is a classroom recorder app specifically designed for students, that allows you to record audio during lectures and take handwritten notes (notepad sketching) while recording lessons. It has been designed to help university students and college students, and it is the best classroom tool for you and your classmates. Recording Your Lectures 1: the one thing your can do to improve your students’ listening experience Posted by Jonathan Sterne June 17, 2020 August 21, 2020 Tl;dr. Oct 02, 2019 This is one of the best ways to record college lectures. While the lecture capture setup outside of a classroom can also be quite simple with select software and apps, there are a few tricks of the trade that can improve the quality of your recordings. 6 Steps for Recording High-Quality, Engaging Lecture Videos 1. Prepare your lecture and slides.
Frequently, lectures and other online course content are recorded outside of the classroom, too. In most cases, all a teacher needs to record online course materials outside of the classroom is lecture capture software and a laptop with a built-in webcam and microphone, or a mobile device. This is one of the best ways to record college lectures.
While the lecture capture setup outside of a classroom can also be quite simple with select software and apps, there are a few tricks of the trade that can improve the quality of your recordings.
6 Steps for Recording High-Quality, Engaging Lecture Videos
1. Prepare your lecture and slides
Planning your lecture content and preparing slides in advance can help maximize student engagement. Structure your presentation content in order to help your audience retain more of the material, and prune down content in your slides by eliminating anything that duplicates what you are saying in your lecture — use your slides to enhance your key points, not repeat them. Exposure 7 0 1 96 – photographic film effects. Students will be more likely to pay attention to your lecture and watch it all the way through to the end.
2. Download your lecture capture software or app
You’ll need to download lecture capture software to your Mac or PC, if you don’t have it installed already. And if you plan to use a tablet or smartphone to record digital course material, be sure to download the mobile app, providing your lecture capture software has one.
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3. Optimize audio and video quality
Your recording environment will determine any extra equipment or devices you may need to maximize the audio and video in your recording. Choose a quiet, well-lit room or office, and position your webcam so that it records your head and shoulders and sits about eye-level.
In a quiet, well-lit environment, you should get good enough audio and video from the native microphone and camera in your laptop. Some things to watch out for when recording lecture content outside the classroom:
Backlighting: If there is a lot of light behind you, or you sit in front of a window, you run the risk of looking like a shadow in a webcam video.
Low lighting: Webcams have small sensors and tend to make video look choppy and grainy in low light.
Loud fans and other background noise: Air conditioners, machines that hum, computers with loud fans, and even voices from outside the room can compromise the audio in your lecture video.
Visible clutter behind you: Avoid sitting in front of anything that can be busy or distraction to your viewers. This will ensure they focus on the content in your presentation.
Additional Recording Equipment For Optimizing Video Quality
A&p 1 Lecture Exam 2
In the event that lighting and background noises are a concern, there are affordable, simple solutions that will improve the quality of your lecture recording.
External Microphones: Quality audio is of utmost importance when recording a lecture — if students can’t hear or understand you, they won’t be able to watch the video. To improve audio, you can add a microphone that plugs into your USB port, such as the Blue Snowball USB microphone, the Blue Yeti USB microphone, or the CAD U37 USB condenser microphone.
Additional Lighting: Making eye contact in your video is necessary to maximize engagement with students. Make sure that your face is visible and lit with soft light from the front. You can simply position a desk lamp or two behind your laptop, or try this DIY studio lighting hack to soften the light on your face.
Related Reading: 7 Tips For Making Your Webcam Videos Look Good
Lecture Recording on Mobile Devices and Apps
You can also record lectures outside of a classroom with a tablet or smartphone, though these devices are typically more suited for field recordings or showing multiple viewpoints in a demonstration. Follow all of the above setup tips if you are recording with a mobile device and app, but also keep in mind the following:
Most mobile device cameras have stabilizing technology, but you should considerusing a small tripod or stand if you are recording yourself — it will create a better viewing experience for your students and free up your hands as your present.
You can add a clip-on mic that plugs into a standard audio jack, such as the Rode smartlav mic, if the sound you are getting from you phone or tablet’s built-in microphone sounds garbled or isn’t loud enough.
Maximize the light in the space where you are recording and avoid backlight. Video quality tends to degrade quickly in low-light or when there is backlight, since cameras on mobile devices have small sensors.
4. Record a test video to check the quality of your audio and video
Once you have your lecture materials and recording setup ready to go, record a test video. In this video you can not only practice your presentation, but also check to make sure you are happy with the sound, lighting, and overall video quality.
Record Lectures Online
Watch a lecture video recorded using Panopto:
5. Record and edit with your lecture capture software or app
Load your slides into your lecture capture software, press record and begin your presentation.
Record all the way through without pressing stop in your lecture capture tool until the very end — if you make a mistake, simply stop presenting for a few seconds to leave a silent pause in the recording. This will make it easy to edit out the section you don’t want later. Once you’ve captured your initial recording, you can begin to edit out the sections you don’t want in your video.
When you are satisfied with your recording, click upload. Your lecture capture software will process, optimize, and upload your recording to your video library.
Related Reading: How To Live Stream Lectures
6. Share your lecture video to your LMS
As it’s uploading, Panopto automatically transcribes every word spoken in your video and uses AI to make everything inside your videos searchable. You can also request 508-compliant captioning right inside Panopto to add human-edited captions to videos. After your lecture capture recording has processed, you can share the link with students or add the video to your learning management system (LMS). And if your lecture capture software includes video analytics, you can even evaluate the effectiveness of your recordings. For example, if you notice that students are dropping off at a certain point, you can re-edit your original video in your lecture capture software to improve the learning experience.
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Tl;dr: Hang a blanket, quilt, or something else that’s absorbent behind you while you make your lecture recordings.
That’s it.
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A whole lot of people are going to be audio recording their university lectures in the fall, or delivering lectures live over Zoom. This series of tutorials will give you some easy steps to make them better.
Students are going to spend hours listening to recorded lectures. It’s going to be difficult for them. Some small improvements in sound will make a huge difference in their experience of your course.
The most important thing you can do for the sound of your lectures is to reduce the room echo that people will hear in your recordings.
After months of Zoom meetings, I can tell you that many people deliver lectures from echo-y spaces. The current fashion for sparse decoration, and hard wood floors means that sound bounces around the room a lot.
The problem with echo is this: If you record yourself with a lot of echo, your words are less clear. It’s like doing course readings from a bad photocopy with blurry font (#gradschoolflashback). If your students have trouble hearing you, they have to turn you up more, which also amplifies all the echo in your room, which means they have to turn you up even more. Pretty soon they are blasting their ears. Now multiply that by 5 classes by 160 minutes a week. Brutal.
The solution: Luckily, this is easy and low tech to fix. You do not need fancy room treatment (unless you are a nerd like me and doing other audio recording).
You just need something behind you that absorbs sound. One inexpensive solution is a moving blanket or thick quilt. A Canadian Tire moving blanket will set you back about $20 (Canadian). You will want to hang this a couple feet behind you, about a bit higher than your head while sitting in the position where you will record. Anything can be used to hang it: a clothes rack will work just fine. Just make sure it’s hanging behind you and the mic.
Why this helps: Reverb comes from sound reflecting around a room. Your microphone tends to pick up sound coming from behind you.* By having something to absorb the sound, you get less echo in your mic, which is then less amplified by the software, which makes your words clearer, which means that students don’t have to work as hard to hear you, which makes your lectures easier to understand.
But this isn’t a perfect solution. This will not get you perfect acoustics, but it will greatly improve the sound your students hear. You can move the blanket around and position yourself as you like and try different approaches. It is worth messing around a bit to find a sound you like for your voice. Then just do it every time and forget about it.
Bonus round: If sound absorption is the goal, and fabric absorbs a lot of sound, should I record in a closet where all my clothes are hanging? Ask yourself if you want to record a semester’s worth of lectures from inside a closet. I believe the answer is a hard no.
An alternative solution: Some kinds of microphones pick up less room sound. These are particularly good for voice recording (and are often used in radio). If you use one, room sound is less important. The mics in laptops are just fine for recording your voice, but they do tend to get a lot of room sound because of how they operate. I will cover this in my microphones tutorial.
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The second instalment tells you to record in shorter segments and not obsess over what you’ve recorded. This is the most important thing in terms of preserving your time and sanity.
You can skip the third post–don’t get hung up on the technical part of it unless you are really into that stuff.
This final instalment deals with some of the points of performance and technique. Once you have the moving blanket or quilt hanging up behind you, you can skip to this instalment with not much trouble.
*not true for all microphones, but that will be covered in a later microphone post