Education is changing rapidly. Many universities start to provide their courses on-line, free for everyone to take. To keep up with these developments, I made a short do-it-yourself (DIY) video lecture — appropriately discussing online education — which combines 4 techniques: 1) an ordinary lecture with slides, as always; 2) my talking head from the webcam; 3) written notes on the slides, “Khan Academy-style”; 4) a screencast, capturing live actions on the screen.
In case you like to do this too: The video was made using recordMyDesktop, CamDesk, Xournal, and edited with OpenShot, all running on Ubuntu. I used a webcam to record myself, and a pen tablet (Wacom Bamboo) to annotate the slides. As can be seen, the result is not great: The number of frames per second is low (default is 15 frames per second in recordMyDesktop), the audio quality is low (I need a better microphone), and audio and video are slightly off (not sure why this happened). On Windows a combination of CamStudio, Powerpoint, and Movie Maker might do better.
Many thanks to the following people that advised me or otherwise supported me in making the test online lecture: Wanno Drijfhout & Marije de Heus (Course Managing Big Data), Theo Huibers & Eelco Eerenberg (Thaesis), Tonnie Tibben (Twente iTunes U), Alfred de Vries (SmartXP lab), Peter de Boer & Roy Juninck (FB lecture halls and digital whiteboards). Additional advise and comments are very much appreciated.
Here are the results done by our students for the course Managing Big Data: 1) Wanno Drijfhout, presenting Traitor; and 2) Marije de Heus, presenting Readability of the web