Train. Present. Persuade.

This is the power of screen recording.

Recording Microsoft PowerPoint Live: Lectures without Limitations

Standing in Room 551 of the Terman Engineering Center at Stanford University, Professor Ed Carryer is preparing to deliver another lecture on the finer points of Mechatronics to a full auditorium.

Carryer is equipped with a Toshiba tablet PC preloaded with a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation of prepared and blank slides, his microphone headset is on, and the overhead LCD screen shines bright.

One hour and fifty minutes later, time's up. The lecture is over, but not lost. Camtasia Studio has recorded the entire lecture, Carryer's audio, the questions, and all the complex annotations he has written on the slides since the lecture started. Later that day, students will be able to watch and listen to the lecture again, online and on-demand, wherever and whenever.

"In three clicks I have my lecture produced and ready to post to the university Web site...It's very efficient and...portable.." –Prof. Ed Carryer, director of the Smart Product Design Laboratory at Stanford University

Camtasia Studio is the behind-the-scenes screen recorder that makes this possible, even easy.

Better Learner Retention via Screen Recording

Carryer, director of the Smart Product Design Laboratory at Stanford University, sought to help engineering students learn and retain more from two-hour, information-packed lectures.

"The reality is our graduate engineering class content is exceedingly full at Stanford so we were looking for a student resource so they could review the live class lecture after it was given," said Carryer.

Initial attempts to record screen activity and "talking head" video using older technology failed, however.

"We would fix a video camera on the professor and on the overhead projector. What we ended up with was an extremely bandwidth intensive solution, actually a waste of bandwidth," said Carryer. "They ended up with basically a video of my head...The...quality of my annotations, which are most important, was poor and it meant I couldn't leave the podium, or for that matter, that particular lecture hall."

For Carryer, the big breakthrough came when he coupled a Tablet PC with Camtasia Studio. He was finally able to record lectures in real-time, using transparent technology that produced lightweight, streaming video.

Camtasia Studio: Technology that Adapts to You

For Carryer, one key benefit of Camtasia Studio was that it worked smoothly with his unique presentation style instead of forcing him to do things a certain way.

"There comes a point when your lecture style becomes very familiar and comfortable, and something the students get used to. The technology solutions we tried in the past interrupted my lecture style. I was adjusting for the technology instead of the technology fitting my style," said Carryer.

"This is a very important point because we want to be able to provide our students with the best possible learning resources. We also want our lectures to go smoothly and they need to be free-flowing so that means Camtasia needs to record my live lecture in real-time, which it does."

In Carryer's experience, Camtasia Studio running on a Tablet PC offers the spontaneity of overhead slides in a new, digital medium. He appreciates being able to mark up a slide, then come back to it later in the lecture.

"Camtasia Studio is critical because it's the only screen recording package that records all the annotation layers and inking live," he said.

Students Rate Recorded Lectures "Best Resource"

Carryer's online, on-demand lectures are very popular with students. He recalls a comment from a graduate student who said, "This is the best resource anyone has ever given me." On teacher evaluations, nine out of ten students rated the recorded lectures, "the best resource the class offers."

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