Recording a seminar

“After a modest investment of $200 for both the software and a good webcam, there are no other costs for recording the seminars and uploading them to UCTVSeminars,” Professor James Carey said.

He and UCTV recommend Camtasia recording software. The Camtasia-webcam combination provides two video captures: one of the presenter’s slides and the other of the speaker.

“This way the content is clear,” Carey said. “It is a huge mistake to try to capture both in the same viewing frame as in video camera. This is basically hassle-free and easy to operate.”

Watch Carey’s how-to video on recording a seminar.

Submitting to UCTVSeminars

UC faculty and researchers are invited to submit their own seminars, which can range from simple, low-cost narrated PowerPoint presentations to highly produced videos. The seminars.uctv.tv website includes a video uploader, plus helpful hints and tips — and the aforementioned how-to video. Programs appear alongside user-submitted metadata, including descriptions, related links, lecture notes and other complementary materials.

About UCTV

UCTV, sharing educational and enrichment programming from the UC campuses, national laboratories and affiliated institutions of the University of California, reaches 23 million homes nationwide on satellite and cable. UCTV also is available online, via live stream, video archives and podcasting.

Online
uctv.tv

Satellite
Dish Network, Channel 9412

Cable

• Yolo County — Comcast Channels 15 and 17
• Sacranento County — Comcast Channel 15 and Surewest Channel 21
• Click here for complete cable information.

Seminars are like books, only better — because you get to hear from the experts themselves. And, like books, seminars are available to an infinite audience — but only if they are recorded. And assuming people can find them easily on the Web.

Now, thanks to UC Davis Professor James Carey, UC is gathering seminar recordings from around the system and putting them in a single place, easily navigated, on the UCTV website.

“This will not only help the UC system become a scholarly resource, but will fulfill our public service mission,” said Carey, of the Department of Entomology, whose idea has become a first-of-its-kind archive in a university — and who envisions seeing the UC archive become part of a national or global repository of academic seminars.

In 2008-09, while serving as chair of the University Committee on Research Policy, Carey called for a strategic approach to record, broadcast and archive the hundreds of seminars that take place weekly on the 10 UC campuses. He presented his plan to the systemwide Academic Council, received enthusiastic approval and then launched a pilot program at UC Davis.

His call for a “UC Research Seminar Network” became reality in May, under the name UCTVSeminars — including seminars, conferences, colloquia, distinguished scholarly lecture series, annual university lectures by eminent faculty, and the like — all free, for UC faculty and students and the public, too.

“Most UC research is funded by the taxpayers,” Carey said, “so it can be argued that the public should have direct if not immediate access to the results.”

The seminars may be viewed in Flash format, downloaded as audio and-or video podcasts, and embedded in outside websites. The presentations also are being posted on UCTVSeminars’ YouTube channel and on UCTV’s iTunesU channel.

Check out ‘Zoobiquity’

UCTVSeminars went live with a range of content that includes the six-part “Zoobiquity” conference, held at UCLA and featuring UCLA and UC Davis clinicians and scientists in human and veterinary medicine — all discussing the same diseases in a wide spectrum of animal species and human beings.

Also featured: presentations from the Ecology and Evolution Seminar Series hosted by the UC Davis Ecology Graduate Group.

Seminars like these take place every day in the UC system — 300 to 500 a week, more than 10,000 in an academic year. UC Davis hosts its fair share — and surely there are faculty members and researchers here who would like to take in seminars up and down the UC system, and vice versa.

But how can scholars keep up? And how can the campuses cut the costs of putting on seminars?

As lead author of an article published on Jan. 10, 2010, in the international journal Public Library of Science, Carey suggested that the UC Research Seminar Network would “encourage speaker sharing, reduce travel, augment outreach and provide electronic feeds for on-demand streaming and archiving.”

Professor Bob Powell, chair of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate, said: “We need every tool at our disposal to keep the high quality of UC academic programs during our unprecedented budget crisis. Jim has been especially creative in making knowledge at the forefront of scholarship available to researchers on all UC campuses for a minimal investment.”

$200 for webcam and software

Said Carey: “The cost to capture these seminars is low — a one-time expenditure of about $200 for both the webcam and software.”

His pilot project at UC Davis started with 49 seminars, including 16 in the Department of Entomology, eight in the Graduate Group in Ecology and Evolution, and 25 from a two-day conference hosted by the Humanities Digital Institute.

“The audiences were universally supportive of the webcasting operation with no evidence of distractions due to the presence of the Camtasia-webcam system,” Carey said. See box for more information on Camtasia software.

Carey described seminars as “a treasure trove” and “one of the most forceful and efficient mechanisms for transmitting scholarly information.”

“It takes an enormous amount of time, energy and resources just to plan a seminar,” Carey said. “It is foolish not to invest small amount of additional time to capture and post.”

‘Buried’ on the Internet

In fact, many are being recorded and put online, but before you could see them you had to find them.

“While many scholarly presentations are posted online after the fact, they often end up buried in departmental or conference websites, making it difficult for those unaware of the event to discover on their own,” a UCTV representative declared in a news release announcing the launch of UCTVSeminars.

The new web portal “offers a simple, cost-effective solution by providing a single destination for scholars to find and share peer-to-peer scholarly presentations in any academic discipline via video and visual media.”

Using UCTV’s existing online dissemination infrastructure and experience organizing large video collections for prime search engine optimization, UCTVSeminars offers an easy-to-navigate user interface that allows visitors to browse videos by subject area, event date, speaker name, conference, host organization or UC campus.

While presentations must originate from a UC campus or affiliated institution, they feature researchers from universities around the world.

Reinventing the academic conversation

“One of the great intellectual achievements of the University of California is its ability to bring the best minds from within the university and across the world to our campuses to share ideas, spark innovation and build collaboration,” said Peter Siegel, UC Davis’ chief information officer and vice provost for Information and Educational Technology.

“As Professor James Carey has demonstrated through some of his most recent work, technology offers exciting new opportunities for expanding and reinventing these conversations.

“With the UCTV Seminars, we open a new chapter in providing this access not only to the citizens and policy makers of California, but to colleagues literally around the world,” Siegel said.

Carey said he hopes UCTVSeminars “will provide strong encouragement for researchers, seminar chairs, department heads and others to video-capture and share their seminars as well as visit this website.”

He said he is especially pleased that academia is catching up with modern technology.

“Academia is slow to adopt video, thus this development will encourage greater use of this technology that virtually all other sectors of our modern society are using in communication,” Carey said. “There are many domains in which these seminars can be used, not only for on-demand viewing but in digital textbooks and teaching.”

Alexander Harcourt, UC Davis emeritus professor of anthropology and ecology, could not agree more.

“This is one of those resources that is so obvious, so useful, that we can only shake our head in wonder that we did not have it years ago.

“Missed a seminar? Missed a diagram in a seminar? Missed thinking about what the speaker was saying because you were concentrating so hard on writing it down? With UCTVSeminars, you no longer need to miss anything.”

UCTV and Kathy Keatley Garvey, senior writer, Department of Entomology, contributed to this report.