Lecture Capture: Zoom vs Kaltura for Recording

This article serves to instruct as to the best tool to use for lecture capture in your course.

Instructions:

Lecture Capture tools:

Whenever possible, record your lectures ahead of time with Kaltura Capture. Prepared videos are effective because they:

1. Are available at any time to students
2. Are suitable for large groups
3. Give you the ability to ensure the quality of your own lecture on your own schedule
4. Allow you to break up lectures into smaller chunks for more effective viewing
5. Ensure unstable networks don't impact student success
6. Text from your presentations is searchable, allowing your students to easily find content within the lecture
7. Have the most engaging playback experience, such as being able to manipulate the Instructor and content windows and search the recordings

8. Use live Zoom sessions when instructional strategies require real-time audio/video collaboration in smaller groups. Examples include:

9. Facilitating discussion among students, including using breakout sessions
10. Sharing Zoom whiteboards
11. Using live polls
12. Hosting guest speakers
13. Holding virtual office hours
14. Facilitating Q/A sessions after viewing recorded lectures or other materials

Some students won't have access to fast internet connections, and others may have their schedules disrupted. The best practice is to cloud-record any live classroom session and be flexible about how students can attend and participate. Cloud recordings will automatically be sent to Kaltura's My Media and can be published for students who may have missed the live session. 

Tools for recording lectures

Zoom

If you are already using Zoom to meet with students, it can be very simple to use Zoom to create recorded lectures. The same process you use to record a class session can be used even if you are the only person in the meeting. Simply share and present content from within the Zoom room, and record yourself as you go through your material. If you choose to record and save to the cloud, you can access your recordings directly in Kaltura. If you record to your local computer, you can still upload your recording to Kaltura. Please note: Zoom recordings uploaded into Kaltura will not present the viewer with the most robust playback experience as it would if created in Kaltura Capture or Kaltura Classroom. The instructor video is not adjustable in the player by the viewer and could potentially cover up important screen content. Additionally, metadata such as words and terms within the PowerPoint presentation are not searchable.

Once you have finished your recording, whether you cloud-recorded to Kaltura or to your local computer, you can publish it within Canvas. The Kaltura Media Gallery allows you to upload videos in no particular order or you can choose to incorporate your recordings directly by embedding them into assignments, announcements, pages, or anywhere that you see the Rich Content Editor in Canvas. 

Kaltura Capture

An alternative way to record your voice as you present content on your computer is to install special screen-capture software, called Capture, from Kaltura.  You can access it through the My Media tool in any of your Canvas courses. In either place, if you choose Add New, one of the options will be Kaltura Capture. 

The first time you use Capture you will need to install the software. Capture is available for both Windows and Mac, and includes several options for recording: your voice, with or without webcam; your computer screen (which could be limited to a PowerPoint presentation, other software programs, or content from a web browser); or even content from additional cameras (such as a document camera). 

Kaltura Classroom

Similar to Kaltura Capture, Kaltura Classroom captures the audio and video content during your lecture in the classroom. It is already installed on classroom Windows computers and is launched from the applications list. This tool is useful when teaching face to face yet you want a recording of the lecture for students who may have missed class or who would like to review the lecture. This is not a synchronous tool like Zoom and can't be streamed in real-time. 

PowerPoint narration

If the content of your lecture is exclusively in PowerPoint, and you would like to be able to add, delete, or edit slides after your initial recording (or perhaps change the voice-over for one slide), you may want to consider narrating over your PowerPoint and recording. This option requires the most recent version of PowerPoint (Office 365) and that you save the file as an .mp4 if you are uploading it to Kaltura.

This option is best for longer recordings, or for ones that you would like to be able to refine in the future. Unlike Zoom or Capture/Classroom recordings, PowerPoint recordings can be changed in small ways, like editing a typo in a slide. This is also helpful if you decide to delete selected content or add slides with new audio, at some point in the future.

Need additional help?

Please fill out the myCourses webform with as much detail as possible, or contact the Technology Help Desk on your local campus.