Lecture Capture Software and Branch Quizzing: What’s Available for Flipping the Classroom?

A new trend in edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy is the idea of “flip­ping the class­room”. Flip­ping the class­room is when an instruc­tor pre­pares a lec­ture and has the stu­dents watch it before they come to class, which in turn the stu­dents are pre­pared to dis­cuss the con­cept or class time is used to demon­strate a prin­ci­ple or answer ques­tions about the con­tent they were intro­duced to in the lec­ture. If you are inter­ested in flip­ping your class­room or just want to record lec­tures for your stu­dents to use as study aids, how does one get started in lec­ture cap­ture and what tools are available?

What’s great about lec­ture cap­ture is that you don’t need a high tech class­room to record your­self. In most cases, a web­cam, a lap­top, and the right soft­ware will do. We recently did a sur­vey and inves­ti­gated soft­ware for lec­ture cap­ture and the top four we researched for their fea­tures to record and the abil­ity to cre­ate quizzes were: TechSmith’s Cam­ta­sia, Adobe Pre­sen­ter (ver. 8), Adobe Cap­ti­vate ( ver. 6), and Microsoft Pow­er­Point (Office 2010 edition).

Cam­ta­sia is a great soft­ware if you are look­ing to record your screen and a web­cam at the same time. It does have a Pow­er­Point add-in so you can start to record right from Pow­er­Point. One draw­back was if you were run­ning Pow­er­Point 64bit, the add-in for Cam­ta­sia did not appear in the rib­bon in the Add-in tab. Also, if you are look­ing for a strong branch quizzing fea­ture, Cam­ta­sia is very lim­ited. Cam­ta­sia allows for you to jump to a keyframe in the time­code if a ques­tion is incor­rect, but there is no way to jump back to the quiz and retake the quiz or jump back to the pre­vi­ous video. Stu­dents would have to scroll back through the lec­ture to get back to that other keyframe to start after the quiz. You can also setup another quiz to go back, but that get’s con­fus­ing on your time­line and after you answered the ques­tion incor­rectly, it was dif­fi­cult to set the quiz ques­tion to allow you to attempt the quiz again. But if you are look­ing for a tool to just record the web­cam and place it on top of the screen­cast of the Pow­er­Point or other things you are demo­ing on your com­puter, this is a great tool.

Adobe Pre­sen­ter works with Pow­er­Point by adding an add-in Adobe Pre­sen­ter tab to your rib­bon. The biggest hur­dle with Pre­sen­ter is it does not work with 64bit com­put­ers. With Pre­sen­ter, you record audio or video for each slide using the Pre­sen­ter tools in the Pre­sen­ter tab inside Pow­er­Point. You insert and cre­ate quizzes the same way. You have the option of cre­at­ing graded quizzes or sur­veys. The video record­ing with the web­cam in Pre­sen­ter is very high qual­ity (which also depends on your web­cam) and you can add fea­tures to the video (like cap­tions, name title) and even show your slide and your web­cam side by side, which makes for a nice pre­sen­ta­tion. The screen­cap­ture and web­cam appli­ca­tion for Pre­sen­ter isn’t inte­grated well with Pow­er­Point. It either cre­ates a new Pow­er­Point with the video (which then you have to copy and paste back into your Pow­er­Point slides) or you can save it to your com­puter then import it into the Pow­er­Point slide. When a sty­lus is used while record­ing video with Pre­sen­ter, the cal­i­bra­tion is off when writ­ing on the the slide with the sty­lus. Once the pro­gram was done record­ing the video, the cal­i­bra­tion for the sty­lus was nor­mal again. You can also record audio for each slide using Pre­sen­ter. The Quiz Man­ager was con­fus­ing because you had mul­ti­ple places to edit for feed­back to cre­ate a branch­ing quiz. We found that mak­ing a sur­vey was eas­ier to work with than a graded quiz ques­tion, and just edit­ing the top level of the quiz for feed­back and branch­ing pro­duced the best results. There are three lev­els you can edit for a quiz and this can make the user dis­ori­ented when using this prod­uct to cre­ate branch­ing quizzes.

Adobe Cap­ti­vate is a great tool if you are look­ing to cre­ate branch­ing quizzes. This tool also gave you the option to export as HTML5. Most of the soft­ware here exports to Flash if you want the quizzing fea­ture inside your lec­ture cap­ture. Cap­ti­vate allows for you to import Pow­er­Point slides. The Branch­ing View fea­ture inside Cap­ti­vate cre­ates a visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion to show you how your branch­ing quizzes work inside the lec­ture and you also have the option of export­ing the Branch­ing View as an image. You can import videos and Cap­ti­vate has a built in Adobe prod­uct to help you con­vert videos so you can use them inside Cap­ti­vate. You can record audio inside Cap­ti­vate for each slide. You have a lot of options inside Cap­ti­vate which can be con­fus­ing to a user at first and some­times the soft­ware behaves strangely (as in we re-arranged slides inside Cap­ti­vate which broke the Branch­ing View and never updated the branch­ing View to show the changes we made). The biggest draw­back with Cap­ti­vate is that you can not record your web­cam, only your desk­top. You would need to record your­self speak­ing into the web­cam and import that video into each slide. What’s nice about the screen­cap­tur­ing fea­ture for Cap­ti­vate is that it pans with you as you move your cur­sor around the screen. Cam­ta­sia also has this feature.

The last soft­ware we explored for lec­ture cap­ture and quiz branch­ing was Pow­er­Point. If you already have Pow­er­Point, you don’t need any addi­tional soft­ware unless you want to record your web­cam video. You can set up hyper­links to jump to slides if you want to have branch­ing quizzes inside your Pow­er­Point. The learn­ing curve is less if you are famil­iar with Pow­er­Point. You can pack­age the for­mat as a PPT Show so the stu­dents start right inside the Pow­er­Point. You would need a screen­cap­tur­ing soft­ware to record your screen if you want to record anno­ta­tions you are mak­ing on a Pow­er­Point slide and import that video into a Pow­er­Point slide (so videos are cre­ated exter­nally from Pow­er­Point). The hyper­links are not really quizzing, but they can pro­vide feed­back by link­ing to feed­back slides. The user view­ing the Pow­er­Point will need Pow­er­Point installed (or some­thing that can open a Pow­er­Point) to view the file. Under the File Tab of Pow­er­Point 2010, you have the option of going to Save and Send and choos­ing Cre­ate a Video. This will not work if you want to do quizzing since the video will play right through with­out hyper­link­ing to feed­back. It will put your audio record­ing in for each slide (which you can record audio right inside Pow­er­Point). It will save the video as a Win­dows Media Video (.wmv). Pow­er­Point is a great place to start if you want to start exper­i­ment­ing with light quizzing and lec­ture cap­ture for your course.

Each of the soft­ware pack­ages we reviewed had their strengths and their weak­nesses. Below is a break­down and sum­mary of what we found when we reviewed the soft­ware. Hope­fully this will help you on your jour­ney to flip­ping your classroom.