Capturing the Moment

Universities long to take advantage of communications technology to educate students who wish to learn but who cannot actually be in the classroom. Some of these students might be involved in real-time distance learning from remote locations, while others may be accessing the lecture and associated materials days, weeks, or even years later.

Until now, the complexity of video production has made it difficult and expensive to capture the substance and the essence of a classroom lecture, but that is changing thanks to Rice’s Capture Classroom Project. The 18-month research program is aimed at lowering the video production costs associated with distance learning, making it easier and cheaper than ever to produce a webcast, videoconference, or videotape archive of lectures and events. This is being done by creating a new infrastructure for producing video in classrooms. The project is a joint effort of the Information Technology (IT) Department and the Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning (CTTL), and it was funded by an $850,000 grant to CTTL from the Texas Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund. The grant paid for all equipment upgrades, and IT agreed to provide staffing.

At least four cameras, audio equipment, communications gear, and other multimedia equipment were installed in each of four mid-sized Rice classrooms. While the multimedia setup in these rooms is not new, the rooms are controlled in an entirely new way. A single technician in a central control room in the Mudd Building can control each room. “Normally, you’d need a whole crew of people for this kind of production, with people controlling the cameras, someone shifting between camera views, and somebody else on sound,” says Hubert Daugherty, the chief technical designer on the project. “What I’ve attempted to do is replace all but one of those people with technology.”

The setup of links between the classrooms and the control room also is unique. Traditional video production has cables running straight from microphones and cameras to the control room, but that wasn’t practical in this case because the classrooms are spread around campus and the control room is centrally located. Instead, Daugherty used the campus’s intranet to communicate with each classroom. Daugherty isn’t aware of anyone who has ever devised such a system, and the setup took a lot of trial and error.

There was another hurdle to overcome in the control room, where a single operator would be doing the work typically done by several technicians. The user interface has to allow the operator to simultaneously view and switch any of eight possible images: each of the four room cameras, the VCR, the presenter’s computer screen, the off-site videoconference picture, and an eighth output used for miscellaneous devices like DVD players or document cameras.

The solution came from Terry Graham, an audio/video specialist in IT, who created a system of “cascading” windows on a touch-screen panel. With this system, the operator can see all eight images on the top half of a touch-sensitive computer monitor. Tapping one of the eight small images with a finger brings up a larger view in the bottom left section of the screen, also known as the director’s preview. The operator uses a joystick to control pan, tilt, and zoom, then gives another quick tap on the preview window to send the image to the audience.

“While Rice researchers will directly benefit from this project, Hubert and his team have achieved something that will be felt far beyond the boundaries of Rice,” says Tony Gorry, director of CTTL and the principal investigator for the Capture Classroom Project. “They’ve created a technical roadmap that any institution can use to significantly reduce the financial barriers for distance learning.”

Currently, the project encompasses four classrooms and a small conference room. The researchers began using the first of the classrooms to come online last October to produce weekly videoconferences between Rice and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston for the Keck Center for Computational Biology. Daugherty expects all the rooms to be operational by the end of the spring.

— Jade Boyd