Recorded Lectures

The University of California, Berkeley is leading a project called OpenCast that aims to develop free, open source software that would make it easier for professors to podcast their lectures. Officials from more than 30 colleges and other institutions have joined an email list to discuss possible paths for the project. OpenCast aims to streamline the process of recording lectures and allow course audio and PowerPoint slides to be recorded and unloaded automatically. "I want them to focus on teaching and not the technical details," says Cole W. Camplese, director of Education Technology Services at Pennsylvania State University, who has participated in initial OpenCast discussions. OpenCast will be designed to work with iTunes U, a free service from Apple that many colleges already use to post course material, and Sakai, an open source course-management system, and potentially several other services. There are already several companies that sell products with features similar to OpenCast's objectives, but UC Berkeley Learning Systems Group product manager Adam Hochman believes it will be cheaper in the long run to build a system rather than to pay for enough copies of existing software to cover the number of lecturers the school plans to eventually record.