Echo360 announced the launch of new capabilities for their lecture capture software to provide faculty and students with a reliable video capture solution for classroom PCs. The new features are rooted in an advanced, algorithmic approach which anticipates, identifies, and corrects issues that often arise with lecture capture by automatically handling common problems such as shifting inputs and resolutions to ensure that the capture continues and is successful, regardless of the devices used.
“As faculty experiment with an array of pedagogical approaches — from online to flipped, small group or hybrid models–we see increased application for lecture capture and lecture streaming,” said Perry Samson, professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and head of teaching innovation at Echo360. “A multitude of capture contexts and devices, however, requires solutions that can ensure reliability despite inevitable interruptions, user errors, and challenges in the implementation environment.”
As a growing number of institutions rely on general-purpose computers to record lectures and small group interaction, Echo360’s new capture algorithms build on its existing cloud-based scheduling and administrative monitoring capabilities to make software capture more reliable, mitigating the risks that can happen with video to ensure a seamless and easy to use way to record learning in real time. Even in the face of technical interruptions, the software continues to capture the teaching content and learning moments, says the company.
Additional features of the company’s new lecture capture software include:
- Automatic capture recovery: When a PC or laptop reboots due to a system crash or power failure during a capture, the recording automatically resumes with the previous configurations and settings.
- Input loss or change notification: If audio or video input is lost during a capture, the system will notify the user and automatically switch over to a secondary input, as available. The system will also notify the user anytime an input is restored.
- Recovered capture ‘reassembly’: If the capture process is restored after a system failure or loss of input, the software will automatically reassemble the captured segments together and publish a single, contiguous file to the online platform as scheduled.
- Capture duration for ad hoc captures: Instructors no longer need to remember to end the capture process before leaving the classroom. They can now configure the duration of the class when they start a capture and it is automatically ended and published when class is over.
“The purpose of technology in the classroom is to make teaching and learning more efficient, effective, and engaging for students today,” said Bradley Fordham, CTO of Echo360. “Since we know capture problems occur in real-life instructional environments such as system reboots, instructors forgetting to end a capture, or faculty switching from a camera to a smartboard on the fly, we want to protect the instructional moments algorithmically. The new features are designed to counteract inevitable challenges and issues, and adapt in real-time to create a more seamless and reliable way to capture teaching and learning.”
The features are now available. For more information, visit http://bit.ly/2qmbNNE [1].
Material from a press release was used in this report.