DEMO: Best Practices for MOOC Video

This page describes our setup for the demo we presented at Learning @ Scale 2014. While the demo was a 15 minute overview with some tips for production, this page includes a lot more detail about how we made everything work.

Slides

Here’s some download links for our files:

An unfinished, as given, version of our slides can be found, here. (PDF link).

Setup

Our setup was relatively simple for the demo, and once configured could be setup in a couple minutes. The signal flow diagram below shows how everything was connected. We had a green screen, and a light standing next to the camera, facing the green screen to help with lighting. The “Host” computer was the main computer providing video to a single projector.

As a quick point, the entire setup (excluding a laptop) could be built for around $2,000 depending on how much extra equipment or features you need. If you’re looking to build a setup yourself, shoot for a good middle-range for flexibility that would allow you to upgrade as necessary.

At the demo, we projected the composite feed (green screen overlay on slides) to the projector. In a normal lecture setup, you would probably want to project the presenter’s output. To do this you would split the output of the presenter computer. We’ve listed one recommendation for a splitter below.

demo-setup

Hardware

This is a list of the specific hardware that we used during the presentation, with a little bit about what each piece was doing. We’ve listed specific models, but you should be able to swap any item for something similar if you’d like.

Additional Tools

Software