By Florence Olsen
© 2003, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Reprinted with permission.

Adi Mayan, a sophomore majoring in business at City University of New York's Bernard M. Baruch College, attends lectures in her macroeconomics class and later watches a digital-video recording of the lecture "just to make sure I understand the material."

"It's always good to hear it a second time," Ms. Mayan says, adding, "I love economics!"

Administrators and professors in Baruch's Zicklin School of Business have discovered that making digital-video recordings of lectures available online can help undergraduates succeed in large lecture courses. Students use the digital-video versions if they want to review or have missed a lecture.

Most colleges that record lectures do so for the benefit of distance-education students. Baruch is unusual because it records lectures for some courses that it teaches in classrooms, and it spends very little money doing so.

Baruch's business school selects one lecturer in microeconomics and one in macroeconomics, and records their lectures. The lectures are available online a day or two later. Students can also download audio-only versions of the lectures to portable MP3 players, which many students have for listening to music.

Making digital-video recordings of lectures is one of several changes that the college began introducing three years ago in an effort to improve students' academic performance in microeconomics and macroeconomics, which more than 1,000 students enroll in every year. Before three years ago, about 40 percent of the students who started either of the two courses either dropped out or failed.

Professors are still analyzing academic results from the fall 2002 semester, says Phyllis Zadra, assistant dean of the college's business school. But the numbers appear to be better, she says,at least in microeconomics, where about 75 percent of the students satisfactorily completed the course. About 63 percent completed the macroeconomics course.

Providing digital-video versions of lectures is not the only thing that the business school is doing differently in its effort to lower dropout rates in the two large lecture courses. The school now requires students to take precalculus as a prerequisite for microeconomics, and it makes students take microeonomics before they take macroeconomics. The school also has begun requiring students to attend review classes led by qualified graduate students, and its professors have agreed on a single textbook and related instructional software for teaching.

When Baruch extended the use of video-recording to its introductory financial-accounting course, it selected a single professor to video-record, Christine Tan. Ms. Tan creates the exams for the 12 sections of 80 students each who typically enroll in the course. Her lecture "is like the gold standard," says Jeffrey Weiss, a professor of economics who manages the school's digital-video recording projects.

Mr. Weiss says that colleges mistakenly approach digital-video production as if it were television, and they spend more time and money than necessary producing the lectures. At Baruch, lectures are captured in Apple Computer's QuickTime movie format.

This semester, the college enhanced its video-recorded lectures by creating chat rooms within each QuickTime movie so that students can talk online with their classmates while they review the lecture material. In addition to the video and audio tracks, the QuickTime files include URL tracks and text tracks.

Baruch's business school has received small grants from the university for the video recording, and it operates on a minimal budget by using graduate teaching assistants for camera, editing, and programming work.

Lectures typically are captured by cameras mounted on the back wall of a large lecture auditorium. The standard frame rate for the video is comparatively low—five frames per second. At that rate, students can download a good portion of a lecture in 10 minutes using a 56K modem, Mr. Weiss says.

The most important aspects of a video-recorded lecture, he says, are clear audio and readable text on the PowerPoint slides that the lecturers use. Students can click on links within the video lectures to view the slides.

Graduate assistants use Sorenson Media's Squeeze to compress the QuickTime lecture files and Apple's QuickTime Pro to edit the lectures, two programs that are both "powerful and easy to use," Mr. Weiss says.

The lectures are labeled according to topics they cover, allowing students to jump right to the part of the lecture they want to see. If the text of the lecture has been added to the file, it runs within the movie window like a closed caption, and can be searched using key words.

Jakub Popadiuk, a sophomore who is majoring in finance and investments, says that late at night he likes reviewing video-recorded macroeconomics lectures instead of reading the textbook. "Reading," he says, "makes me fall asleep a lot of the time."