Faculty Exchange/Scott Segal Discusses Using Camtasia To Capture Class Content

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General Information

  • Audience - All WSU instructors interested in capturing key class concepts for student use anytime they need to review.
  • Interview Date - 7/11/2011
  • Tools Used - Camtasia

Meet the Faculty Member

Dr. Scott Segal, WSU Assistant Professor in Biology, received his B.A. at the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. at Northwestern University. His research looks at gene expression at the post-translational level. Specifically, his interest focuses on understanding the mechanisms controlling gene expression at the post-transcriptional level, using the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. His teaching focus on the Biology 430: Molecular Biology, Biology 307: Cell Biology Laboratory, and Biology 311: Genetics Laboratory.

Viewing the Interview Segments

The interview is divided into eight segments. Select play to begin viewing Segment 1. To advance to another segments at any time by using the Next Next button.

Segment Descriptions

  1. Why use Camptasia for capturing class content? Scott explains that Camtasia is useful for short vignettes of course content, show different drawing over the top of slides and images.
  2. Describe how you are using Camptasia in your courses. His content is very detail oriented and requires drawing on slides annotating concepts that even his book doesn't cover well.
  3. Do you have a requirement for viewing ? While Scott doesn't have a viewing requirement, he explains here how he explains the process for promoting repeated viewing of the content.
  4. Have the resources proven to be effective in your courses? Scott describes in this segment the different ways this allows him to pull content in from other classes and cover other concepts that might not otherwise would have been covered in this course.
  5. How did you prepared for creating these vignettes Scott provides some great advice here on the preparations one should be taking to ready yourself for the process of capturing with Camtaisa.
  6. What advice would you give faculty considering the use of Camntasia in their classes? Scott provides some sage advice in this segment for anyone who is considering capturing content for students. Key concepts include keeping your vignettes short for both you and your students, work with specialist to decide what capturing software you might want to go with, and focus on learning the basics and then start recording.
  7. Where are you going to take this project to next? Scott explains that the short vignettes helped him get the best balance on difficult topics so students would correctly realizing deeper they needed to dig into the details of the specific curriculum.
  8. What help did you receive as you implemented this activity? In this segment Scott talks about the different ways TLT helped him before, during, and after the recording process was completed.

Good Practices

  • Time-on-task considerations. Keeping segments short and to-the-point. If you are tired recording these vignettes, your students will be tired watching them.
  • Using annotations to illustrate a key concept. Scott used digital ink to annotate detailed concepts and dynamically illustrate more complex ideas that we could not otherwise have shown.

Key Outcomes

  • Content developed was tailored to his exact needs.
  • Allows him to provided additional content from other classes.
  • Provided a way to deliver difficult content to students so they could start to learn how to balance the need to dig deeper into complex concepts and self-efficacy to move on when they master easier concepts.

Related Articles

Learn How to Replicate Scott's Activity in Your Own Course

Learn More About Camtasia

Capmtasia has an excellent video library of tutorials designed for beginners to advanced users. The Camtasia Studio 7 videos can be found at Techsmith.com. If you are new to this tool it is highly recommended that you check out the following videos:

Learn More About Capturing Technologies