These technologies can enable educators to improve communications, enhance student learning, controls costs, manage Internet access in the classroom, and more.

There are many systems and tools available in today’s marketplace that can help administrators and faculty to succeed with some of the many things they need to do in their roles. Some of the technologies I’ve listed below are “back office” tech (not really visible to the end user), and some directly impact teachers, students, and/or parents, but both administrators and teachers alike will recognize the potential for these technologies to help them be more efficient and more effective in their day to day operations.

Classroom Management applications: If you don’t already have this type of software for your computer labs, then you’re either hearing frequent requests like “we want to be able to shut off Internet access, how can we do it?” or you’ve probably limited Internet access so much that you’re hearing a lot of griping about it. You can provide instructors with extensive control over classroom Internet access, and a wide range of additional functionality (at a pretty affordable price) with tools like NetSupport School. Classroom Management applications also let the instructors see what each student is doing on their computers, share their desktops with everyone, and much more. (Note that these applications are primarily intended for managing computers on hard-wired connections – applications for managing wireless connections may be limited, based on how the wireless connectivity is managed).

Have you considered outsourcing your call center?

Lecture Capture: This is one technology that I think has really only just begun (oops – sorry if you get that corny song stuck in your head now!) to be leveraged. Teachers can record their lectures with very little effort, and those lectures can then be available to students to replay to review complex concepts, or for students who couldn’t attend class. If the first thought you have is that this will increase absences, there is a growing body of evidence that this is simply not the case. The only thing holding many institutions back from leveraging this technology is lack of awareness, and costs, but awareness is growing and costs are coming down, so the use of Lecture Capture will continue to expand. Click here to learn more about Lecture Capture applications like Tegrity, Panopto, and others.

Parent Portals: This is a favorite of mine. The school district I live in rolled out a SchoolTool parent portal this year. We can now see our all of our kid’s schedules, teacher contacts, end of term grades, state assessment results from previous years, and more, and this information will remain accessible for the life of the Portal. The quality and quantity of information being provided to parents here will continue to expand as teachers and administrators become more familiar with the available functionality. Parent Portals should be requisite for K-12 school districts everywhere, and I have no doubt that it won’t be too long before it is the norm, rather than the exception, for schools to have them. Click here to learn more.

- Click here to view a video blog entry for this post -

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service): The number of applications that are available in a web-based, hosted environment continues to explode, and this technology is becoming more mature every day. Business is continuously moving more and more functionality “to the cloud”, and education is following suit. This is not just a buzz word or the latest fad, it is a proven way to ease the support burden on your IT staff, improve availability and scalability, control costs, and enhance business continuity preparedness.

When SaaS is done right, it offers a wide range of benefits. Just be sure you understand a vendor’s Service Level Agreements, and their track record at meeting them, before signing on (that is if you are looking at an enterprise app or other costly tool - for freebies like Google Docs, just dive in and check ‘em out!). This is a subject worthy of a feature post, and I’ll be writing more about it soon.

Skype: This free application makes it easy to connect (using webcams, or just audio) over the Internet. Free video conferencing capability can really extend the reach of administrators, teachers, and students. Skype is one of the most popular Web 2.0 tools being requested and used in the school where I work. We’ve used Skype to enable home-bound students to offer presentations, to bring guest lecturers and other guests into the classroom, and we’re considering using it for online application interviews, remote advising and counseling, and to let people on campus connect when they can’t abandon their posts. Other schools have used it many different ways – one of the most common ways cited is to establish a connection between their students and students across the country or across the world, classroom to classroom. The potential applications for Skype are limited only by your imagination! 

Well, that’s my list of 5 essential technologies for education administrators to be aware of and informed about. I’m sure you may have some others to add to this list, so feel free to comment with your suggestions, or observations about the above tools. We’d love to hear what you have to add to the conversation! Thanks.

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Video blog entry for this article
Managing Internet Access in the Classroom with the Right Technology
Learning about Lecture Capture Technology
SchoolTool and other Parent Portals in K-12 Education
Skype in the classroom

We took our free trial Tegrity account out for a ‘test drive’ the other day. We like it.

This is a follow up post to the series I ran here in February and March, in which I learned about some of today’s Lecture Capture systems, and selected a product to test. My goal was to find a proven tool that allowed for easy and affordable testing, and that could scale up easily and cost effectively.

In the last post in the series, I narrowed the choices down to Panopto and Tegrity, and ultimately selected Tegrity for a number of reasons, including the fact that they made trial use so accessible and straightforward. 

This week we took Tegrity out for a spin. Our intention was to test it by capturing a Finance Club meeting (often given in a lecture-like format) being held here at the college.

Preparing to Record
Setting up the PC and making sure it was ready to record was easy. I logged on to the test account provided by Tegrity, and clicked the “Record a Class” button. Since it was the first time doing this, the Recording application had to be installed, which only took a few clicks, and I was ready to go. I performed a quick test capture using the webcam built into my laptop.

For recording in the classroom, I wanted a portable webcam, so I could install and run the recording app from the instructor PC in the classroom. We purchased and tested a Logitech Webcam Pro 9000, which worked great. This camera is a nice quality, simple USB camera that’s plug-and-play under Windows Vista (around $75 from Amazon at the moment I write this). 

We went up to the classroom where the meeting was going to be held ahead of time to set up the camera, install the recording app on the PC we were going to use, and try it out. Everything worked fine. We decided to stop with our initial short test capture, and run it through the upload and processing routine, to see how that worked and look at the results. Assuming all went well, we would come back to a future meeting and capture the whole thing.

The Results
I was really happy with the way this process works, and the results. This is some pretty sweet technology.

Our very short captured lecture content (around 3 minutes) took maybe 5 minutes to upload to Tegrity and get “processed”. Processing includes the automated sectioning of the content into ‘chapters’, indexing, etc. I assume a full length lectures would take a good deal longer to process and be ready for playback. 

I created a brief video to show some of the features of the application. Note that much of this video is me speaking over screen shots and pointing out functional aspects – for a taste of using Tegrity as an end user, check out their showcase page here. (Also note that the resolution of the screens as they display in the Tegrity client is much better quality than the resolution captured in my video).

Here’s a little more on some of the functionality offered through the application (some of which is illustrated in the video above):

• Lectures are broken into sections (called “Chapters”) to make them easier to search through and use.
• While the content is playing, the user can easily make any of the windows (the video of lecturer or capture of the projected image) full screen. This is how you get the best quality playback on the screen content – you can really see it in pretty good detail when you make it full screen (the demonstrative video I’ve made above doesn’t reflect the true quality of the playback from with Tegrity).
• Another nice feature is the ability to search for specific content in the course. Any text that was on the screen for 20 seconds or so is indexed for searching, so if you search in the Tegrity Search box (located towards the upper right hand section of the screen) for an indexed word or phrase, it will return links to any matching lecture sections, which you can then click on to jump to.
• The instructor can also tag sections of the course with ”Bookmarks”, which display in the window in the lower left hand corner, and let the students click on them to jump to those sections of the video. Students can also add their own private bookmarks that only they will see.  
• You can also associate web links and uploaded files to the course which students can easily find and click on to go to those web pages or download those files.
• Instructors have a variety of editing capabilities, allowing them to to do things such as clip video sections, add their own keywords, add closed captioning, and more.
• This is a hosted application – create content on any end user computer and then upload and host it on Tegrity’s site. Ease of use and cost containment are a wonderful benefit of the SaaS delivery model done well, and Tegrity appears to deliver them both.

Conclusion
Tegrity seems to be a very worthy product, and I look forward to capturing a full length course, learning more about it, and demonstrating this functionality to our faculty.

Next Week
The video shown here was made using Camtasia. Next week, I’ll probably blog about my experiences using Camtasia for the first time. As readers may recall, a few months back I did a series on Screencasting tools, and ultimately determined that free tools like Windows Movie Maker and Jing just did not have the horsepower to allow for efficient production of training videos (due to editing limitations). Camtasia costs a few hundred bucks, and provides wonderful capture, editing, and packaging capabilities … more on that next week.

Related posts (if the above topic is of interest, you may want to check these out):
Learning about Lecture Capture Technology
Learning about Lecture Capture – Part 2 (features and functions)
Lecture Capture Part 3: Looking for scalable entry-level options
Lecture Capture – selecting a trial approach

Picking a Lecture Capture product to test, with a focus on affordable entry and scalable tech and licensing.

Last week, in the 3rd post in this series, I combed through a half dozen LC vendors’ websites looking for insight into the hardware required to try out these tools, and the scalability of their technology and licensing models. My goal is to trial one of these solutions, and to do so in a way that gives me something we can easily build on. Based on information I came across on their sites, I settled on Tegrity, Panopto, and Elluminate for a closer look.

This week I had some informative conversations with representatives from Tegrity and Panopto. I learned a good deal and share much of it below. As for Elluminate, as I learned more about their offerings, it confirmed that they’re really a horse of a different color, primarily geared towards live broadcast.

Tegrity & Panopto Product Similarities

• Client (recording workstation) requirements:  Both of these solutions use the technology available on the client computer, along with an installed recording app, to capture lecture materials (versus some other vendors that offer proprietary capture stations).
• Server requirements:  They both offer hosted solutions. Panopto also provides a local server option.
• Captured content: Each app allows for the capture and playback of video, audio, associating files and links.
• Storage and upload of captured materials: Both of these apps store captured materials locally (on the client computer) during capture and then let the user upload to the central server, which processes and prepares the materials for broadcast.
• Indexing and searching of content: The indexing and resulting search-ability of course materials is one of the great features about these applications. Tegrity appears to have an advantage in this area, with a patented “search anything” engine that indexes any text content that stays on the screen for 20 seconds or longer, along with the contents of Powerpoint slides and other files (if I understand correctly, Panopto only indexes Powerpoint slides).
• ‘Sectioning’ of video: Another standard function of these systems is to break video into more manageable sections.

I highly recommend that interested readers take a look at examples of captured lectures, available from both vendors (click here to view an example lecture captured with Panopto’s product, and here to view some Tegrity examples).

Further product and vendor insights, and some product differences

Panopto representative Rob Toe was a great help at helping me understand how CourseCast works, and familiarizing me with options for trying it at my school.   

CourseCast comes is two basic versions – a core app, and a premier version. They’ve made the premier version accessible for trial for a limited period at no cost (no licensing, and no equipment requirements beyond the basic client functionality, since it’s hosted). One way to implement CourseCast on a larger scale for a manageable cost is to opt in to their Socrates program, which positions you to run their core product on your own server for free (and one server can provide for a pretty large user base).

As to the differences between these two levels of product, the premium version includes a Mac compatible recorder, user analytics/reporting, and enhanced integration with Learning Management Systems.

Tegrity Rep Gay Katilius provided an insightful and informative demonstration of the product, and also provided a test account for me to use to get the apps hands on and give it a real workout!

Tegrity boasts some nice features, including excellent integration with a variety of Course/Learning Management Systems, and Student Information Systems, along with LDAP or AD integration for authentication, and social networking linkages to tools like Facebook. From an end user perspective, their Bookmarking feature is worth mentioning, this allows students to easily bookmark content they are viewing with predefined bookmarks (such as “Unclear”, or “Important”) for follow up.

As for entry level licensing, “Tegrity Lite” allows for the recording of 3 courses for 1 year, for free. Since the solution is fully hosted, you don’t need anything but a capable client computer (Mac or PC) with the free recording client app installed.

Conclusion
These two apps have more similarities than differences. Tegrity has made is so easy for me to try their app, it’s pretty much a no-brainer to go ahead with trialing it. I should point out that this effort is not requirements-driven, but is instead focused on introducing this technology to faculty, and simply raising awareness of it. After I test this out a bit and share it with others, I’ll share some observations and thoughts here.

Next Week
Next week I’ll be announcing the winner(s) of the “Great Use of Ed Tech” story contest. I’ve received some great stories and look forward to sharing them with you, and to doing a full length post on the winning story.

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Learning about Lecture Capture Technology
Learning about Lecture Capture – Part 2 (features and functions)
Lecture Capture Part 3: Looking for scalable entry-level options

A further look at the tech behind some of the big Lecture Capture apps, and their entry-level options and scalability.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been learning a bit about lecture capture systems. This week I take a closer look at a few specific products. I am particularly interested in those vendors whose products and licensing lend themselves to easy entry-level access to this technology, in a form that can easily scale up. 

My approach to today’s post was to search a number of the big Lecture Capture vendor’s websites for info on two things: 1) the technology used to enable the apps (does it require a central server? is it available in a hosted architecture? can you scale it up easily?) and; 2) the scalability of the licensing/pricing model.  

I want to identify a solution that I would be confident bringing into my institution to use in real applications, on a small scale that lets us learn, and that can scale up easily if we decide we’d like to do so. I spent a few hours poking around these web sites, and some seem to indicate that they offer what I am looking for, while others may offer it but it wasn’t evident from the materials I saw. 

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Per their web site, Tegrity (2.0) is totally web based and claims to be fully scalable. The annual subscription price to the Tegrity service is based on either full time enrollment (FTE), number of classrooms, or a combination thereof. “Your subscription may cover the entire campus or individual departments. In either scenario, every student and every professor may use Tegrity at no additional cost. Hosting your recordings with Tegrity is optional.” You can also try the product for free for a limited time with Tegrity Lite.  

Sounds like there may be pretty inexpensive licensing arrangement, with minimal equipment investment, that could let a customer start small and build without having to rework the solution. I’ll be following up with Tegrity.

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Per the Panopto website, “Getting up and running with Panopto CourseCast is easy and cost-effective. Compatible with simple Web cams and wired classroom cameras, no fancy recording equipment is needed to begin creating high quality, rich media recordings. Panopto CourseCast can run off existing infrastructure without proprietary hardware. All you need is one Windows 2003/2008 server to run an entire campus deployment. For small individual deployments, instructors also can subscribe to Panopto’s hosted service with no installation required.” The latter sounds like it may fit what I am looking for.

There is a free trial available for Panopto. They also offers the Socrates program which positions schools to get free lecture capture software and to participate in product design, in exchange for being willing to share “use case-studies” for potential marketing purposes. 

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I get the impression that Elluminate chose to evolve their web based meeting and collaboration tools into something that can work for more traditional lecture capture functionality, but I may be misinterpeting this.

Elluminate offers “Open Access” licensing that provides flexible access to a suite of their products. A single, fixed annual fee for 1 to 3 years, custom priced based on your needs. So it sounds like their pricing may be nicely scalable. I believe the tool set is fully web based. I don’t get the picture fully from poking around their web site, but I am interested enough that I think I will reach out to them and learn some more. 

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The Echo360 website states, “The capture appliance from Echo360 is the premium recording option—providing enterprise robustness through a dedicated plug-and-capture approach. Purpose-built for academic capture, the appliance has inputs for typical A/V sources in a compact design suitable for podiums and equipment racks. With software updates automatically installed, the appliance cuts the time and cost associated with maintaining PC-based recording solutions.” 

Page 9 of this nice PDF Brochure is focused on ”Scaling Lecture Capture”, but it still sounds like you need a central server in place to use the system. While you can easily scale up capture stations thanks to the modular capture module, I am assuming that the server requirements makes initial adoption more costly than what is possible with the vendors above. 

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“The room-based version of ACS is ideal for everyday recording of activities in classroom and corporate environments. This appliance provides a cost-effective alternative to expensive satellite communications and telephone services with its use of IP bandwidth for web broadcasting.”  The Room Based Appliance sounds like it may be an interesting way to get started, but if I understand what I’m reading on their products page, a dedicated server is required to stream video, so again, initial adoption of their products may be more cost prohibitive than some of the other vendors choices. 

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 Sonic Foundry makes Media Site, which has been the LC market leader for years. Per their marketing materials, “Mediasite Recorders automate the capture and delivery of multimedia presentations that combine audio, video and high resolution presentation graphics. The result is the industry’s simplest workflow, eliminating time-consuming authoring or post-production work. Plus, seamless integration with your existing audio/video and educational technology means you can confidently scale rich media webcasting throughout your academic or corporate enterprise.” 

Media Site sounds great, but I spent a fair amount of time checking out their web site and found very little information about the licensing model, or whether or not a central server is necessary to get started. I just didn’t feel compelled to look much further until I followed up on the potential solutions I think the other vendors may have to my intro-level requirements.

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This week we continue our research into the technology behind today’s Lecture Capture systems.

Last week, I started a series of posts focused on learning about the lecture capture systems being used in education today, and the technology that enables them. My first post looked at a few of the big players in today’s market. This week I’m trying to get more familiar with these systems by learning about some of the different features and functions available in them, and looking more closely at some of vendors marketing materials and product showcases.   

Today’s LC systems have a wide variety of available features and add-ons. I list some common features and functions below. I then provide a few links to some vendor marketing materials and product info that I found gave me a little more perspective on some of these applications and how they work.   

Features & Functions
Here are some of capabilities of, and differentiating factors for, today’s Lecture Capture systems. This listing helps to give a sense of some of what these tools can be capable of.     

Integration with existing equipment: This can be a huge plus, and bring down the cost of putting these types of systems in place. If a lecture capture system can integrate with existing white boards, projectors, input devices like tablet PCs, and so on, the potential utility delivered through the purchase of an LC application is instantly increased.      

Ease of Use: This is a big one from the perspective of the instructor! Is the system easy to use, or will instructors find it cumbersome and confusing?   

Editing & Annotation: Can lecture content be edited? Is it possible to add annotations, such as visual elements (highlights, arrows, circles, etc.) or text notes, over or alongside the video playback?      

Integration of supplemental materials: Can electronic documents, such as PowerPoint slides, lecture note files, and other digital media, be associated with and delivered with lecture video/audio?    

Polling, Surveys, Q&A: The ability to have polls, surveys, and Question & Answer sections associated with a lecture, which can be delivered and administered through the system, with results stored for access alongside lecture materials.      

Integration with SIS and/or CMS/LMS: The ability for a system to integrate with an institution’s Student Information System, enabling automation of some administrative functions, or the ability for lectures to be easily incorporated into today’s popular CMS and LMS Systems (Blackboard, Moodle, etc.).   

Easily scalable expansion: More and more of these vendors are looking to provide solutions that can meet the needs of both small schools and major universities, and scale up from trial use to full blown implementation, positioning customers to get the most out of their investments by just adding additional functionality as needed.   

Playback Controls: Can viewers speed up, slow down, or freeze playback? Can audio be downloaded to a mobile device to listen to on-the-go?  

Search-ability (Indexing): Can content be easily searched? Is it indexed to enable efficient searching? Are there other ways in which content can be organized for access?  

A closer look at some LC systems
A few links a variety of resources that provide further understanding of how some of these systems work, and hands-on access to some captured lectures and associated materials.   

• The “How It Works” Page from Echo360:  This page has a great clickable “EchoSystem Work Flow” graphic that provides insight into functions of their system such as scheduling, auto capture, auto package, and more.
• Tegrity Showcase Page: This showcase page from Tegrity provides access to a sampling of captured lecture materials (and some advanced Tegrity functions), providing hands-on access to the lecture viewer’s user experience (you need a high speed connection for this to perform best). 
• Here we have a quick “How To” video (about connecting and using a projector), created and hosted with Panopto. This gives a sense of what Panopto looks like from a viewer/users perspective.
• This 2 page case study overview provides some insight into how the Accordent system was used to provide Lecture Capture in some multimedia classrooms at the University of Northern Iowa. This implementation leveraged existing investments, and appeared provided very good ease of use for instructors.
• This full video from SonicFoundry, makers of market leader ‘MediaSite’, is quite long in its entirety (almost an hour), but has some good discussion (in the first few clips) of how a K-12 school district gradually learned and grew in their use of Lecture Capture. This shows how some regular, non-techie teachers picked this technology up and rolled with it and helped developed a nice lecture capture and delivery system.

Next …
Having now learned a bit more about how some of these systems work and what they can do, I realize that some vendors provide low cost of entry to systems that can scale up nicely. I am interested in knowing more about this, and I feel I still have a lot to learn about these systems in general. 

Next week I think I will search out some more video clips and related materials that help me to better understand the technology and techniques that enable this great functionality. The week after that I’ll wrap up this series with a look at how to approach this with a limited budget.   

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Learning about Lecture Capture Technology
A Dozen Great Free Online Video Lecture Sites
TeacherTube, and other YouTube alternatives for instructional use

The use of Lecture Capture is expanding in both Higher Ed and K-12. What kinds of tools and technologies are being used to capture and rebroadcast lecture content?

One of the main reasons that I blog is to learn - picking a technology from the expanding array of those being used in education today, researching it, and sharing my findings here. I’ve been wanting to learn more about Lecture Capture and the technology that enables it for some time now, so off we go. 

If you want to learn about something (and you’re a tech geek like me), “Google” it. A Google search for the phrase “lecture capture” returned Educause’s, “7 things you should know about … Lecture Capture” article as one of the top results. I’m not particularly surprised by this, as Educause has produced many of these wonderful 2 page overviews of Ed Tech topics. I highly recommend giving this article a read through for a nice overall picture of what lecture capture is, a little about how it works, concerns and issues to be aware of, and more. 

We’re going to focus on the technology in this post. 

Lecture capture tools and systems can scale up or down to meet your needs
Because lecture capture can incorporate different elements of the lecture process, lecture capture can be performed in various degrees, using a wide variety of tools. Some efforts at lecture capture consist of just an audio stream, perhaps coupled with PowerPoint slides or other electronic documents. These can be made available as podcasts, coupled with the associated files. In fact, many schools use some form of this type of approach today. 

On the higher end of the spectrum are robust systems that help to facilitate and automate the entire lecture capture and delivery process. A growing number of higher education institutions have made significant investments in these types of systems (along with many K-12 schools, businesses, healthcare organizations, government, etc.).

Thanks to the many ways in which lecture capture can be approached, one can experiment with the process on a small scale, knowing that larger systems are available to move on to if an organization wishes to. 

Starting with a look a some full-featured lecture capture systems
I’ve decided to first get a sense of what a complete lecture capture package consists of, and then consider less costly alternatives (having become aware of the various elements one might wish to try and provide in a more scaled down approach). 

Following are a few of the large scale systems available in today’s marketplace, and a snippet or two of information about them. This listing is intended as a jumping-off point. I will be posting more about some of these tools, and others, next week when I look more closely at features and functionality. For more detailed information in the meanwhile, visit the vendor’s product web sites (provided), or check out the articles provided below.  

Sonic Foundry’s/Mediasite: According to a June, 2009 article from Campus Technology, Sonic Foundry (at that time) held 40+ percent of the lecture capture market if you include business, education, gov’t, and health care. Obviously a player and product to be aware of in this market. 

Panopto/CourseCast: Panopto claims great flexibity, no need for proprietary hardware, and low total cost of ownership among the benefits of their CourseCast product. One very interesting angle is their Socrates program in which they offer CourseCast for free to Academic institutions in exchange for participation in their beta and development programs, and agreement to provide use-case studies for potential marketing purposes. 

Elluminate/Learning Suite: I’ve participated in web events using Elluminate, but I have to confess, I was not aware that they offer lecture capture and related functionality. Elluminate’s different types of tools and functionality, their solution hosting capabilities, and their flat-fee open access pricing all seem to position them somewhat uniquely. 

Echo360/EchoSystem: Echo360 (formerly ‘Anystream’) appears to be focused purely on lecture capture and delivery, selling only the EchoSystem product. This overview page gives a nice visual of the functionality of their system. I also noticed that they own the domain “lecturecapture.com“, where they host an interactive lecture capture community. 

DyKnow/Vision: DyKnow couples their Vision Interactive Education System with their Monitor Classroom Management Software to provide a integrated tool set for lecture capture and delivery and tight control over student use of computers in the classroom. 

This brief list is really just a sampling of some of the popular products in the category. There’s still a lot more to learn as we delve into features and functions of these and other lecture capture applications next week. 

More in-depth articles on lecture capture
If you want to learn a little more and can’t wait until next week’s post, I found these articles to be very informative (in addition to Educause’s “7 things about …” article cited above): 

• “Engaging Lecture Capture: Lights, Camara … Interaction!“, by Margie Martyn, in Educause Quarterly
• “Capturing the Market“,  by Rama Ramaswami, from Campus Technology
• “Lecture Capture Bonus - Instant Replay”, by Rama Ramaswami, from Campus Technology
• “Lecture Capture: A Fresh Look“, by Ann McClure, from University Business

Next: A closer look at features and functions
For next week’s post, we’ll take a deeper dive into some of the features of these tools. After that, we’ll consider how to approach this in a start-up mode (for those of us wanting to just get our feet wet, and those of us with a smaller budget than some of the schools who use the high end tools). 

In closing, let me again reach out to readers to seek your feedback, questions, or observations. If you have experience with any of these types of tools and wish to share something with us, please comment and do so. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask, and I’ll see if I can’t provide some useful feedback. Thanks! 

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
A Dozen Great Free Online Video Lecture Sites
New Web Site WatchKnow.org (1000’s of Free Educational Videos)
TeacherTube, and other YouTube alternatives for instructional use
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A collection of web sites with thousands of free video lectures and related course materials, including many offerings from major universities. 

There are thousands of video-taped course lectures, and many other more complete course offerings, available for free on the Internet today. The quality and quantity of these offerings is growing and improving daily.

How educators and students choose to leverage these types of resources is also evolving. As stated on the Opencast Project web site, “openly accessible course videos help draw attention to a professor’s work, they can keep alumni engaged and informed, and students often supplement their studies with the material.” It should be interesting to see how members of the academic community choose to use this type of resource, in and out of the classroom, in coming years.

General Video Lecture Sites
All of the sites have directories and search tools to facilitate finding content you may desire. Of course, some overlap in these offerings (that is, the same videos on multiple sites) is inevitable.

Academic Earth: This site provides hundreds of free video lectures from professors at leading universities such as Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and more.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium: According to Makeuseof.com, ”Simply put, the OpenCourseWare Consortium is the best place to begin looking for free online video lectures”. 

Free Video Lectures: This site’s vision: ”Every body from every nook and corner of the world should be able to access the best Knowledge Resources available.”

Videolectures.net: Almost 7000 video lectures, with a high emphasis on Computer Science. This site makes good use of Web 2.0 tools, having a Facebook Group and Twitter account. This site also introduced me to the interesting “Opencast Project” open courseware initiative.

LearnersTV: ”Video Lectures, Video Courses, Science Animations, Lecture Notes, Online Test, Lecture Presentations. Absolutely Free”

Lecture Fox: This site is a central link respository with a very simple interface (I like the simple way in which they indicate whether each lecture has video, audio, and/or notes available).  

YouTube EDU: While not all of these videos are lectures, many of them are. A search for “lecture” in this special YouTube section yields “about 60,000″ results!

Video Lectures Sites from Specific Universities
These universities make lecture content available to the general public (and yes, it is quite likely that many of these videos are featured in some of the more general sites above).

MIT OpenCourseWare: Over 1900 Courses. “Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required.”

Open Yale Courses: Not a lot of courses here, but the materials provided are very thorough, with complete sets of lectures and  supporting materials.  

Princeton’s UChannel: A collection of public affairs lectures, panels, and events from academic institutions all over the world.

Stanford University’s YouTube Channel: features over 800 videos, including many lectures (unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to search this content in an organized manner). The example video lecture below, “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity”, by Professor Leonard Susskind in Sept. 2008, is from this channel. 

UCLA “BruinCast”: Most of these are ‘restricted’ (to students in those courses, I assume), but there are still many that are not. Note that to view lectures with video available, you’ll need to download Real Player.

[Ed Note: How did I manage to overlook Apple's "iTunes U"? Oh well, it's here now! Apple's vast resource contains over 250,000 lectures, videos, films, and more. Definitely worth being aware of. - KW 2/20/10]

In closing, I’ll mention that there are  many other educational video sources on the Internet (for some examples,see the ‘Related Posts’ listing below), but I have chosen to concentrate on college level materials in this post (although a few of these sources do contain K-12 level offerings).

As always, if any readers know of any other similar sources they wish to share, please comment and let us know about them. Thanks!

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
New Web Site WatchKnow.org (1000’s of Free Educational Videos)
TeacherTube, and other YouTube alternatives for instructional use
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