The use of lecture capture technologies on college campuses is changing — more colleges are deploying software-based lecture capture systems campus-wide, in turn making it easier for faculty to record lectures and digital course content both in and outside of the classroom.

Many of today’s lecture capture systems can help automate the recording of in-class lectures, requiring almost zero effort from faculty. Outside of the classroom, a teacher can just as easily record digital course content in her office, her home, or even while traveling with simply a laptop loaded with lecture capture software.

Related Reading: How to Record Class Lectures With Lecture Capture Software and Apps

 

This practice of capturing video-based course content outside of the classroom is known as personal capture — and it’s growing in popularity among educators for a number of reasons, including:

• Personal capture gives faculty more control over their recordings and offers more flexibility to shoot multiple takes or redo sections of their videos for flipped classroom content.
• By recording outside the classroom, faculty can often make better eye contact with the camera, thus improving how well students engage with video course content.
• Personal capture has also given teachers the tools to record short 3 – 7 minute microlearning videos, which can help improve students’ comprehension and retention of concepts.

Champions of personal capture contend that recording course content outside of the classroom humanizes the teacher in the student’s’ eyes compared to a traditional 50-minute lecture. Not only can this video setting come across as more personal, but it can also be used in different ways to reinforce particularly complex subjects or lessons outside of class.

Record Bite-Sized Lessons With Big Results

While teachers continue to use personal capture to leverage the standard 50-minute lecture format for creating eLearning materials or flipping the classroom — methods that have proven to be both effective for learning and extremely popular with students — others are taking advantage of the added flexibility personal capture offers to experiment with short-form video content in their courses.

Teachers using personal capture for short-form “microlearning” videos see this as a new teaching approach that helps students truly understand the lesson materials, particularly when it comes to tougher lessons or even common misconceptions on a subject. These short, narrow-focused videos often complement in-class lectures and active learning by digging deeper into important concepts in easy-to-digest chunks.

Why Microlearning Videos Work

Microlearning videos have the power to engage a student more deeply in a specific topic. Likewise, they can be an effective means to simply introduce a given subject, which can then be explored further during class time. Either way, it can be a sticky learning experience delivering lessons that won’t easily be forgotten.

Studies have proven microlearning techniques to be effective for the following reasons:

• Microlearning better motivates learners through shorter, interactive lessons
• Learners feel a sense of accomplishment after completing a task in a shorter amount of time
• Microlearning promotes sensory retention that reading does not

 

Personal Capture Makes Microlearning Possible

Before personal capture software existed, teachers would have to record a lecture in a lecture hall and cut the video down into smaller segments in post-production in order to put microlearning strategies to work in their course designs. And for those wanting to deepen learning and not repeat it, simply chopping a full lecture into short videos wasn’t a true application of this methodology.

Personal capture software like Panopto was designed to support teachers looking to produce new types of video course content in the ways they envision, without extra support from AV staff. Personal capture is a solution that teachers, students, and administrators can all agree is helping to improve learning on college campuses.

Example of Microlearning Video Recorded With Panopto’s Personal Capture Software

Make Personal Capture Possible On Your Campus

Panopto is an end-to-end campus video solution that makes it easy to capture and share course video content, both in and outside of the classroom. Sign up today and start using Panopto for free!