Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Paul Newbury et al.
more interaction with the student and thus provide a basis for further research to address the inherent
resource implications without affecting student interaction.
2. Framework for the provision for digital video
Lecture capture is often considered to be a beneficial add-on to the actual lecture, but this leads to the
issues that have been outlined above. A more appropriate way to think of it is teaching resource
production and the following framework has been designed around this concept. There are essentially
3 key parts to the production pipeline outlined in this paper, materials development, live recording and
streaming.
2.1 Materials development
It is vital when developing teaching material that is going to be recorded that the constraints of the
recording mechanism and the delivery platform are taken into consideration. The student may view
the recorded material on a wide range of devices with varying resolutions and it is key that all material
is clear at the lowest resolution. At present the lowest resolution target device for this research is the
iPhone 3G (Figure 3).
Figure 3: iPhone streamed video (including signed translation).
Thus, there are some straightforward physical rules that need to be observed, such as specific
requirements as to minimum font size, use of colours and safe view area for all presentations.
However, special handling of content is also required. It is not possible for the presenter to provide a
significant amount of text on each slide, thus thought must be given to how textual material can be
replaced by graphical material wherever possible, as shown in Figure 4. This approach also has key
learning benefits in its own right, as outlined in Mayer’s theory of Multimedia learning. Mayer found
that on average, “students who listen to (or read) explanations that are presented solely as words are
unable to remember most of the key ideas and experience difficulty in using what was presented to
solve new problems” (Mayer 2003:126).
Figure 4: Original slide (left) with replacement slides (centre and right) covering the same material
which contain animation and audio and are specially prepared for digital capture
The significant amount of pre-production work put into the development of slides for digital capture
means that these slides are media rich and engaging. The use of the studio also means that full
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