Thursday 30 June 2011

Reformatting virtual classroom recordings to publish them in #mobile formats

During the last MobiMOOC we had some synchronous sessions where mLearning experts gave their insights in mLearning. Here you see an example of a session given by David Metcalf:


How to publish a virtual classroom recording into a mobile accessible format?
What I usely do to reformat synchronous virtual classroom sessions into mobile accessible files is record the screen + audio of the sessions via Camtasia (there is a 30 day free trail version: http://www.techsmith.com/download/camtasia/ )
With Camtasia you can record the screen and audio of the virtual classroom session. You can then edit the recording (maybe shorten some points, or skip immediately to where the session starts without the intro). After the editing you can produce the movie into a format of your preference (mp4, mp3 are most common and cross-device mobile standards).
You do have to take into account getting used to Camtasia, but it is an intermediately easy software (btw I am only an eLearning developer, not a Camtasia person :-D
There is a useful tutorial here on how to use Camtasia (14 minutes) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMwAxdMZOnM
After I have produced my virtual classroom session into mobile formats (e.g. mp4 or mp3 for audio podcast), I cut them up into videos no larger than 15 minutes and load them up to youtube (youtube does not allow videos larger than 15 minutes at first). This allows people with a variety of devices to look at the reformatted virtual classroom movies, as YouTube will now offer those recordings in the mobile YouTube format.