By Cael Field

A large part of classes I have taught in this lovely pandemic era has been asynchronous delivery. When I initially started back in September, my thinking was to use audio-only, or podcast, format. Podcasts allowed for flexibility in how (mp3 files are very flexible) and where (could be running or cooking) students accessed the content. After about four weeks, I asked students in one course (about 80 or so) did they prefer I keep going with podcasts only format, switch to video format (say Kaltura), or did it really matter? As one may expect, it came to around 33% for audio, 33% for video, and 33% for whom it didn’t really matter! I thought it would be lovely to do both video and audio, but I also thought it would mean a dramatic increase to workload in getting both formats out. After testing an approach, I found in the end that it didn’t really add that much more overall.

The approach was running two programs at once: one for screen capture and one for audio capture. I used Kaltura Capture for video, as I found the My Media access point in Moodle very useful. I then used an open software called Audacity for the audio recording. Audacity is quite easy to use quickly, even though it does have a lot of other features. When I want to record, I start the Kaltura and the Audacity recordings at the same time. I am lucky to have two monitors, so one monitor looks like this:
The top program is Audacity, while the bottom is Kaltura. I start and stop at the same time, which means both video and audio files contain the exact same content.

A question I have been asked using this setup is “what if you have to edit?,” which is a great question. Ultimately, my response is . . . I don’t really edit that much anymore. I try to approach recordings as if I were delivering them in front of a live class. If I made an error then, I couldn’t really turn back time and re-do it. If I fumble my words or mispronounce something in a recording, students are pretty good at letting me know, and I make a correction (such as sending out an announcement). I definitely relate to the desire to want to edit, but I found for the time I had to put in (even if it was only one format), I wasn’t really seeing a great return. Letting go a bit allowed me to spend time elsewhere, such as creating more options for students.

I am sure there are other approaches out there to accomplish what I am trying to do, but I have found this process to work well.