Equipment that will be used for the lecture capture at USP

A new state-of-the-art lecture capture system will be successfully rolled out at The University of the South Pacific (USP) commencing from day one of Semester 1, 2017.

The system, one of the largest in the Pacific, gives students access to video and audio recordings of many of their lectures and other teaching activities, providing a flexible learning experience. It uses a combination of commercial hardware and open source as its primary technology.

Professor Rajesh Chandra, Vice-Chancellor and President of USP said: “The new technology gives students the chance to learn and study at their own pace and will let them revisit course content at any point or catch up on lectures on a particularly complex topic and to navigate easily to search for the content they need. This is particularly useful when they miss a session due to illness, timetable clashes or to simply use it for revision purposes during exam periods.

“This Laucala Campus-wide deployment of new digital tools have been rolled out to ensure that students can access and benefit from the new system from the beginning of this semester,” he said.

Professor Chandra explained that the whole idea behind introducing the ‘lecture capture’ initiative is to enable students who are not at Laucala to take advantage of those courses and give students enough choices, opportunities and options to enrol for courses offered at Laucala without waiting for Flexi Schools or for online courses to be converted for online delivery.

In addition Professor Rajesh Chandra, said: “There is a lot of excitement about the new lecture capture system – the system is not just a simple and effective way of recording lectures, but opens up a whole new world of teaching techniques.”

The lecture capture project is in line with USP’s Strategic Plan (2013-2018) and tries to address few of the objectives under Priority Areas 1, 2 and 4 which are Learning and Teaching, Student Support and ICT using state-of-the-art facilities to deliver high quality education.

The University has invested more than $350,000 to set up the new system, which will record up to 6,000 hours of lectures every academic year.
Seven lecture rooms at Laucala Campus have been equipped with this technology which was installed by ITS.

Further application and system software was developed, deployed and integrated by the University’s Centre for Flexible Learning (CFL) and Information Technology Services (ITS) Department and once lectures have been captured, they will be made available within the University’s Learning Management System (MOODLE).

All students will be able to access their materials.