Comment Define your needs first (Score 5, Informative) 126
- 1) Are you looking to make a course accessible after the fact, or do you want to do distance learning (which is what it sounds like when you say "I'd just run Skype") where interaction is possible?
- 2) What types of courses are you making available? For example, some courses only need to a single camera on the teacher, other courses will need both teacher and/or power-point simultaneously, yet others will need video, chalkboard or whiteboard, and teacher, and others will also need the audience. Note also that some disciplines (math especially) use a lot of chalkboard, so you may need multiple cameras.
These are nontrivial considerations, and often overlooked. I've been recording my calculus lectures at my university (Stony Brook), which has Echo360. Unfortunately, our setup is (a) expensive, and (b) useless for my discipline (mathematics), because it cannot capture 16 feet of blackboard in a way that can be read later, especially if you also sometimes use a data projector (which I do). It works fine for power-point oriented lectures, but you can't do mathematics properly via power point, because students need to see the problems being worked, and need to refer to the beginning of the problem (so it doesn't fit on a single slide).
What has worked for me is to set up a pair of HD cameras in the back of the room, pointed so each can see (part of) the blackboard. Then I post-process this into a single video stream later. If I am using a data projector, I also grab the stream from Echo360. (I've also made multiple synchronized streams on a web-page using JWplayer, but this doesn't work as well)
Unfortunately, this is not a turn-key solution.
Something like matterhorn might be helpful too, but you really need consider all of the content needs before deciding on a delivery mechanism.