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sion, cooperative work in small groups etc. The
traditional classroom work (i.e. the traditional
lecture) should be placed outside the classroom
- thanks to multimedia technology. They report
experiments in which the perception of both stu-
dents and instructors were positive.
Independently, Foertsch et al (2002) came to a
similar suggestion. They also started from the need
of moving towards a learning-by-doing paradigm,
and encountered the hurdle that “before students
can be effective team members or problem-solvers,
they need to have a basic understanding of the
problem domain, some background knowledge
about how problems can be solved, and instruc-
tion on how to use the tools at their disposal”. So
they tried to use “distance technology” to actually
reduce the distance between students and profes-
sors. The vision was that if all of a professor's
lectures, syllabi, and assignments are digitized
and put online, professors could spend less of
their time lecturing and more time assisting the
students. This approach was experimented with
a course and reported in their work. As a result,
“the replacement of live lectures with online lec-
tures and Team Labs significantly enhanced the
usefulness, convenience, and value of the course
for the majority of students”.
Day and Foley (2006) and Ronchetti (2009)
came autonomously to the same thought, and re-
ported similar results. The idea in itself is actually
not new - in the past a teacher gave students as
homework a textbook chapter to read - and then
the work in class was focused on discussion of
the material that students had previously read. The
availability of recorded lectures however gives a
fully new twist to this, as during the video-lecture
(recorded with the same lecturer, e.g. during the
previous academic year) students are exposed to
the teaching style of the person with whom they
later discuss: the teacher has the opportunity of
presently exactly his view - and not some neutral
textbook material - to the students before engag-
ing in a conversation with them. In the end, this
approach actually doubles the time students spend
with the teacher (half of this time being virtualized
by videos), allows for a more interactive learn-
ing style, and, according to the limited evidence
collected by the four mentioned papers, ends up
in a much more satisfactory experience for both
teachers and learners.
ECONOMICAL CONSIDERATIONS
ABOUT VIDEO-LECTURES
The previous sections demonstrated that there is
a wide agreement on the advantages of adopting
the video-lecture technology: the next step is to
perform a cost/benefits analysis to decide if and
how to employ it. Recently Rowe and Casalaina
(2006) provided an estimate of the cost of record-
ing one day of conference. According to them the
cost is US$ 3000 - not including travel and living
expenses - (and hence an hourly cost of at least
US$ 300). We think this figure is exaggerated, and
we'll try to provide our own estimate.
Getting the needed infrastructure is easy, as
some commercial vendors have appeared - such
as Tegrity 7 or AutoAuditorum 8 . On the other hand,
open source or free software solutions are also
available (e.g. ePresence 9 , openEYA 10 , LODE 11 ).
These solutions produce lectures that may or may
not have some client platform limitation, and
may or may not be fully automated. A detailed
comparison of these systems is beyond the scope
of the present chapter, but all of them are suitable
to the task. Moreover, every institution can have
different requirements (Ronchetti, 2008), but at
least one of the available free platform - with
their different approaches - is likely to satisfy
its basic needs.
For starting our estimate we note that - from
what emerges from the literature review above
- there is a rather universal consensus that this
technology is pedagogically more sound and
technologically more mature if one focuses on
asynchronous tuition, and on recording live lec-
tures - as opposed to creating synthetic lectures.
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