hi rebecca!
sorry for the delay in replying but i've been on holiday ;) hope it is
not too late!
we've been doing lecture capture since ~2006 and are on our third system
(at some points we were running all 3 at once although presenting a
unified UI to our users throughout). our first system we built ourselves
and was audio only as we were not given the chance to continue to
develop it (though it worked nicely for 7 years with no development or
support overhead at all!)
then we added echo360 for a few years which are best forgotten about -
support was terrible, it didn't do what was advertised, documentation
was terrible (some APIs were never documented) and upgrades often took
the whole service down.
so we are now on opencast matterhorn (started with a pilot 1.5 years go
using epiphan capture devices which proved to be unreliable, moved to
galicaster for the full roll out last september) and have been running a
full production service for 1 year with no real issues.
so, on to the questions...
> 1. What lecture capture software are you running?
matterhorn, with galicaster capture agents. unlike manchester, we use
the touch screen interface and all recordings are started by the
lecturers. we have a very good uptake (some schools are recording
upwards of 90% of their lectures, although others are much worse). i
think it is probably due to having started so long ago - people seem
happy to continue starting and stopping recordings themselves and it
gives them more control (they can pause when they want to say or do
something that shouldn't be recorded for example).
> 2. Is it: a. trial (small); b. pilot (medium); c. university wide
service?
university wide. currently 49 rooms are enabled, and we also allow staff
to upload into matterhorn through moodle so they can use any screen
capture software on laptops for example even if the room is not enabled.
> 3. Is it cloud hosted or locally deployed?
locally deployed. we have a mixture of real tin and vms (tin for worker
machines doing transcoding and delivery machines serving content from
large local disk arrays, vms for ingesting, adminitration, search index
etc.)
> 4. How much staff support does the services require in FTEs?
nobody is directly employed to run the service. first line support is
handled by our general "student desktop and av" support team but isn't a
huge burden as galicaster is very user friendly and our av installs are
fairly stable.
there are 2 of us who work on development and deployment of matterhorn
and galicaster (with some support from our infrastructure team), though
it is only one part of our jobs
> 5. What are your recommendations/lessons learnt?
we have no day to day stuff to do to keep matterhorn/galicaster running.
automate your deployments (we use puppet) so that extra capacity is just
a case of adding more hardware/vms and pressing a button to turn it into
a fully deployed server/capture agent. use monitoring tools to find
problems before they escalate (we are still working on this). at times
we have gone weeks or sometimes months without even thinking about it
while working on other projects.
i agree with stuart about not doing anything that will not scale. make
this the first thing you think about, because as soon as you deploy
something, even if it is only a pilot, everyone will expect it to work
flawlessly all the time and everywhere!
our experience is different to stuart's with regard to voluntary
capturing - as i mentioned earlier i think this could just be down to
the length of time we have had lecture capture deployed. we didn't
really publicise it in the beginning, but the usage rapidly increased as
word spread and students demanded it! an opt out system has been talked
about here but is not a popular idea with academics and i don't think it
would gain us much.
out of the 3 systems we have used, the difference between dealing with
open source compared to closed commercial products is like night and
day. as stuart mentioned the customisation potential is great for doing
cool things and especially integration with other systems. support is
much better with the community rather than echo's paid "service". and if
there is a problem, we can look at the code and to what is going on, and
maybe do some tweaking to help with our specific performance needs/issues.
> 6. Your contact person and contact details:
Paul Pettit
[log in to unmask]
01273 873223
feel free to get in touch if you want any other info.
thanks,
paul.
On 29/08/14 09:18, Rebecca Henderson wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am Rebecca Henderson, currently working an Intern on the Lecture
> Capture project and producing case studies of our experience with
> Lecture Capture.
>
>
> At Oxford University, we're just coming to the end of the year long
> exploratory trial using Panopto within several departments of varying
> size. Currently, the Project Board is deliberating about rolling the
> software, and moving to a much bigger pilot ]. During discussions, it
> was realised that the only data on the experiences of other universities
> also using Lecture Capture is that of Julian Prior at Southampton Solent
> University year out of date. To help us make a more informed decision,
> we'd be extremely grateful if you'd spare a few minutes to fill in the
> survey below (I know this is a busy time of year just before the influx
> of new students!).
> I will be more than happy to share the results of the survey.
>
> Thank you so much for your time!
> Best wishes,
> Rebecca
>
>
>
>
> *SURVEY QUESTIONS*
> 1. What lecture capture software are you running?
>
> 2. Is it: a. trial (small); b. pilot (medium); c. university wide service?
>
> 3. Is it cloud hosted or locally deployed?
>
> 4. How much staff support does the services require in FTEs?
>
> 5. What are your recommendations/lessons learnt?
>
> 6. Your contact person and contact details:
>
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> *Rebecca Henderson*
>
> *Lecture Capture Intern*
>
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Blog: http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/lecture-capture/
>
> /Oxford University IT Services | //13 Banbury Road |//Oxford //OX2 6NN/
>
--
Paul Pettit
Multimedia Development
University of Sussex
+44 (0) 1273 87 3223
|
