It's a portable system for capturing and producing high quality educational content in real time with little prep work for faculty. It's based on the larger format (15 inch) tablet PCs and uses a screen recording software to capture, edit and convert video to a stream-able format. The in-class lecture notes are produced on the fly as the teacher teaches, converted to PDF files for students to download. The software provides for a voice-over, which would facilitate translation to other languages.

The system is well suited to engineering, math, science or software instruction although other highly visual subject areas would also be well served - art, design, etc. Because the instructor can annotate over presentations or freehand equations, diagrams, etc., it works particularly well for our engineering courses.

The video files we produce are large format (640 x 480) and very clear because they remain digital through out (no scan conversion). The video encoding algorithm produces very small file sizes (for video) - an hour lecture is typically only 45 megs. Up to 15 hours worth of lecture can fit on a single CD, 2 CDs will hold an entire semesters worth of content. The files can be easily ftp'ed around the world as well.

I recently presented this system to our State Dept of Education - K-12 and Community Colleges. It was well received as it responds to a number of issues at the state level - better serving under-served areas, multiplying the impact of the state's best teacher's, providing content that forms the basis for distributed learning communities, helping AP students accelerate their learning, etc.

I have been suggesting along the way that we (as a state and as a university) look at creating a digital library of content that we can share for development purposes. The university has committed the space and support, the state's head of the dept of education has stated a clear interest in an international component. There are possibilities for teaching back to the classroom from a distance as well.

So where to go from here? I spoke with UNICEF in Afghanistan; they expressed a real interest in the content being made available to the teachers and faculty at Kabul University (they have received some hardware and network support but need content). As we move forward we will likely be producing a very large body of content - most of it in the sciences, math, engineering etc. and appropriate for everything from K-12, Community College to university education.

What are the possible uses of this content, what are possible funding sources, what are the draw backs of this potentially very large undertaking?

Joe Monahan
Engineering Distance Education
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa
USA