University of Manchester Installs 350-Room Lecture Capture Solution To Meet Students' Learning Needs

After years of testing students’ interactions with lecture capture in the classroom, the University of Manchester decided it was time to install a 350-room lecture capture solution to meet the needs of their students.

The university partnered with Entwine, selected OpenCast as its open source software solution and hit the drawing board.

Stuart Phillipson, Media Technologies Coordinator at the University of Manchester says the school is taking the install seriously: 200 of its 350 were implemented in only 18 months.

“Since then, we’ve been on a two and a half year project to go from ten rooms, and we’re finally drawing the line at 350 rooms,” he says. “We’ll have 300 centrally managed spaces and 50 faculty-owned rooms. The idea is that all of them should have autonomous lecture capture that’s time table-driven. Currently, we’re at 200 rooms and we’re working to get the remaining ones online.”

Phillipson says the University of Manchester’s lecture capture system was built with students’ needs in mind, especially with ease of use while playing by lectures, and to have those lectures widely available.

“We found [students] didn’t like to operate technically complex solutions before, after or during the lecture,” he says. “They just wanted to turn up, get their lecture to interact with them and not with an extra technological system. So one of our overriding goals was to create a system that was autonomous all the way through, from the point of processing to the point of distribution. We also found that they wanted it to be fairly ubiquitous…and had to be able to access this content easily.”

Phillipson says once the students’ lecture capture needs were met, they were happy.

However, the instructors were not.

Phillipson says some of the biggest challenges his team faced was finding instructors who were willing to record their lectures.