Video-themed Pop-up eLearning Lab

We recently ran another pop-up eLearning lab at Falmer. The aim of these events is to take over a teaching space, fill it with enthusiastic technologists (and technologies) and then demonstrate how the examples on show can easily and successfully be incorporated into practice.

This month’s event took place within the SASS Psychology lab in Mayfield House. The theme was filming, video streaming and broadcasting, with a focus on lectures and esubmission. The session offered a chance to get some hands on practice with a range of recording kit, some of which is available to staff as short-terms loans from the Media Centre. If you are interested in using some of this technology to enhance your teaching, we recommend first speaking to your school’s learning technologies adviser.

The recording kit currently available for classroom/lecture/simulation capture or one-to-one recordings consists of a mini iPad with ‘gorilla’ tripod stand and Snowball mic. This can quickly and easily be assembled and its relatively small size makes it adaptable to a variety of spaces and set-ups. The iPads come pre-installed with a couple of apps for you to use. The Fuse app connects directly to our servers which is where you can upload and access your video, while the iMovie app gives you greater control over in-device editing and settings (turning ‘HD’ off, for instance).

Another option is to upload your finished video directly to the university’s new video and media streaming service, Mediastream. This site creates a webpage for your video, much like Youtube or Vimeo, and gives you control over how you want to share that video, whether publicly, with categories of staff/students, or not at all. The site offers fast, reliable streaming and you can embed your video in other website, including studentcentral.

The integration between Mediastream and studentcentral also offers the ability to set your students video assignments. Students are able to submit their video directly to a studentcentral submission point and all the marking and feedback can be carried out within the learning environment and attached to the Grade Centre.

Finally, you might be planning a session or event which could be live broadcast using a service such as Periscope for people outside the space to follow along. This has recently been used at Falmer to live broadcast a workshop tutorial to a large cohort, some of whom had to take part from a separate location due to numbers and capacity. Although Periscope only stores your recording for a very limited time, it does offer the ability to record the video for further use. In the future we also hope to offer a live broadcast service via Mediastream.

If you would like further advice on any of these topics, please contact your learning technologies adviser. We will be running further elearning pop-up labs across the campuses next year. If there are any topics you would find particularly useful, please let us know.

Thank you to Joe Taylor and staff in the Creative Methods Lab for their assistance and use of the space. You can view more images from the event in our Flickr album.