UMass Boston - Ready, Set, RECORD with Camtasia Relay
Ready, Set, RECORD
When the need for lecture capture and recorded content became apparent, UMass Boston turned to their IT team to research, test and choose the best fit option for their school. They needed a solution that would easily integrate with their existing systems, which include Blackboard and iTunesU, be easily implemented and easy to train faculty to use.
Camtasia Relay was chosen as UMass Boston’s lecture capture solution. They started by piloting Camtasia Relay’s capabilities for 9 months before rolling it out to all who were interested in creating recorded content for their classes.
The Set Up
Training and implementation of the Camtasia Relay pilot only took approximately one month, which included one workshop, instructions and further support through their wiki pages and some initial field support in classrooms to ensure no problems arose. Overall, Camtasia Relay was very easy for UMass Boston to deploy. All training and set up took less than one month.
As UMass Boston does not have their own media server, they upload their recordings to TechSmith’s Screencast.com, an online hosting platform. They simply record their lecture, send it to Camtasia Relay server for processing, and then upload the video to Screencast.com for students to access and review.
Results
During the Camtasia Relay pilot, faculty and students both responded very favorably to the positive benefits of using recordings for classroom review. The success thus far is measured by the number of times a video is viewed. Since rollout, UMass Boston’s estimated total views of recordings are over 6,000!
They now have over 32 faculty and staff using Camtasia Relay to record content for student review and/or training tutorials, with this number growing each semester.
What did the Students Think?
As part of the Camtasia Relay pilot program, UMass Boston implemented a student survey to measure reaction, usefulness and the value of recorded materials for students. Here’s what some of them had to say:
“This program is the future of education! I honestly see this in all classrooms from high school to college someday. If all my classes had this software set up, my GPA would be much higher! And your program was easy to access!”
“The availability of recorded lectures is a tool that I find indispensable for exam preparation.”
“It makes time management a lot easier, especially for students with jobs and families.”
“Very useful at exam time to refresh my memory on a large amount of abstract material.”
“You can listen to them anytime you’d like from anywhere with an internet connection. I believe the recordings were particularly well done for this course… This course should serve as a model for all other courses.”
“This strategy was very important and helpful to me this semester in that it enables me to get more depth of the course or subject matter… in such a huge class at some point in time I get distracted or get left back in the lecture due to noise. Also, English is my second language as such when the instructor is teaching on a fast pace, I also get left back or lost in the lecture. But with the audio recording I can listen to the entire lecture at home. This new method is very important, therefore I hope all nursing classes have the opportunity to do likewise.”
View an example of a Camtasia Relay recording from UMass Boston
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