From Professor to Earbuds - Like Magic

How do we get from professors elucidating in a lecture hall to a thousand ideas in your pocket?

We start with CD quality audio: every microphone in the lecture hall is connected to our main A/V system housed in the lectern. Lecturers are free to stand on the podium and use the lectern microphone, use wireless lapels microphones and walk around the room, or any combination of the two.

Audio from the the presentation computer - PowerPoint, DVDs, video clips - and audio from the microphones goes into our amplifier. The combined signal from the amplifier is sent along a line audio feed to the recording computer in the back of the classroom. The signal is converted from line level to USB with a Griffin iMic.

When students area ready to record a lecture a custom Automator workflow saved as an application open's Apple's QuickTime Pro 7 and starts a new audio recording. Students can go sit and enjoy the lecture, returning at the end to stop the recording.

After QuickTime saves the recording, students provide useful metadata - Lecture Title, Lecturer Name, and Course - and the resulting file is sent to a processing machine. The processing machines uses Apple's iTunes to convert the recording to an AAC file using iTunes's "Spoken Podcast" preset. Typical file sizes for these files are 25MB/hour of lecture.

After converting, the AAC file is transferred to iTunes U and archived locally.

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Once the file is in iTunes U, students can browse to it using the familiar iTunes interface. After providing their school username ("uniqname") and password iTunes displays a custom iTunes U page listing their classes. Students can browse classes, preview audio files, and download files from within the iTunes U page.

Students can also use iTunes U's subscribe feature to make sure they always have the most current content for their classes. Lectures automatically download and automatically transfer to to a student's iPod.

What does it look like?

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