Educational institutions create value primarily through lectures. This hasn’t changed even as technological breakthroughs upend teacher-centric traditional systems of education.
There is no smart classroom that has ever managed to replace a teacher so far. Lectures occupy a prime of place. Calendars of even the elite, digital-savvy institutions with global rankings continue to feature lectures prominently. In fact, good lectures serve as great digital marketing tools for institutions.
Rapid developments in audio/video technology is making lecture capturing and lecture reuse more and more feasible and effortless. A 2021 study published in an Indian journal (titled, Lecture Capture System: a Blessing in Disguise for Teaching and Learning Anatomy?) finds out that the recorded lectures help students in understanding the concepts better (as agreed by 76.83% of the survey participants). The study also finds that nearly 80% of the students watch the lectures online and a little over 60% believed that watching lectures online helped them recall the points that they had failed to understand in the class.
However, video capture tools are not yet ubiquitous in most Higher Education Institutions in India. The reasons include the cumbersome process of dealing with multiple tools for video capture and videoconferencing, security risks and issues in integrating video with third-party virtual classroom platforms or video content management systems.
Assuming significance in this context is Astra Pro, a compact and easily portable box that is a complete yet simple video lecture capturing system from A&T Video Networks. It is a sleek, portable box that comes with a camera, speaker, and the necessary software. Much to the relief of the faculty members, they can set it up with a single touch and start capturing (and also streaming) their lectures within two seconds – and, without the support of technicians. Astra Pro can be mounted on the wall. It can get inputs from multiple devices such as laptops, cameras or computers/ laptops. In the traditional arrangement, it would otherwise require a range of independent components such as a joystick controller, a matrix switcher, a multiviewer, – not to mention, the recording and streaming video gadgets.
Plus Astra Pro can be connected to AI-enabled cameras that can automatically track the face of the people who present the lectures.
Just recording the lecture is not enough. Making it easily searchable and accessible to students is an altogether different problem. Ubicast, a Cloud-based content management solution can be bundled with AstraPro to complete the solution. This powerful combination helps institutions not only capture the lectures, but also store the lectures in an organised way and add value to them with newer or external content and media. Videos can be indexed with key data such as topic, lecturer name, key words from the content of the lecture or any other key words. An intuitive search tool makes it easy and effortless for students to find and make use of the recorded lectures
Astra Pro can also be a perfect solution for the hospitals to capture surgeries that can be used for legal compliance and education. The system’s ability to receive multiple inputs comes handy even here as feeds from different channels including the operation theatre camera and endoscopy or laparoscopy devices can be integrated to capture a surgery in its entirety.
