7 Things You Should Know About Camtasia
1. What is it?
Camtasia is program that records cursor movement, typing, and other on-screen activity for demonstration purposes with an audio voiceover. It has been used as a lecture capturing program in the classroom.
2. Who's doing it?
It has been used primarily by large educational institutions such as Ohio State, North Carolina, Michigan State, and Johns Hopkins.
3. How does it work?
"Lecture capture systems include a suite of software applications with specifications for preferred hardware, which typically consists of items such as a camera and a microphone that are available in many classrooms. The Panopto suite, for example, includes CourseCast Recorder, CourseCast Editor, and CourseCast Server. These applications integrate with audiovisual hardware to capture a lecture. Pushing a single button is enough to activate turnkey systems like Tegrity Campus and Panopto CourseCast and begin capturing a lecture. Recordings can be viewed on the web or in formats compatible with MP3 players and portable video devices." ~http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7044.pdf.
4. Why is it significant?
Camtasia provides students and staff an opportunity to review and recall content presented during lectures. It does not serve as a replacement for lectures, but rather a supplement to them.
5. What are the downsides?
"A complicating element of lecture capture is ambiguity over who is responsible for providing the recording resources and who owns the intellectual property once the recording has been made. Using these systems for classes, conferences, and guest speakers might require a legal release, particularly when lecture capture depends on a complex infrastructure provided by the institution. Colleges and universities must also decide whether the same release applies when a professor independently captures a lecture and makes it available to students on a faculty website." ~http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7044.pdf
6. Where is it going?
"Lectures could easily result in large stores of material that require new paradigms for search and archiving, including the ability for students to create personal course archives. The platform may invite mashups as developers enable ways for students to annotate a lecture itself and share the results with study groups. Such additions to captured recordings could change the character of the lecture as students annotate and reorganize what they have heard.
Institutions will need to establish copyright policies for captured lectures, arrange releases, and ensure that intellectual property rights are not left in limbo. Future lecturers might find that elements of course content become a point for contract negotiation under the heading of "courseware rights." ~http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7044.pdf.
7. What are the implications for teaching?
This tool provides a multitude of teaching and learning advantages. Lecture capture provides flexibility and convenience for both students and teachers.