All posts by Rick Salisbury

Beyond YouTube: Great Places to Find Video for Your Online Course

Here’s a statement I have been hearing a lot lately that some may find surprising:

“I wish there was a video online about X. I searched on YouTube, but I couldn’t find anything.”

Now, X could be anything—Biology, Economics, Politics—and while I doubt the search came up empty, I understand the sentiment.

The great thing about YouTube is there is a great video about practically any subject or concept you can imagine. The problem with YouTube is there are a thousand awful videos about practically any subject or concept you can imagine. If you are looking for a specific video, you can probably find it on YouTube, but if you are interested in discovering video that be used in an educational context, YouTube can be really frustrating.

To end the frustration, I thought I should give a list of some my favorite places to find educational content and post an example video for each. I will use “Biology” as my search term, and I promise not to spend more than two to three minutes searching on each site.

 

Academic Earth

Academic Earth offers a great collection of classroom lectures and course materials from leading universities such as Harvard, Berkeley, and Yale. It’s not original content. The videos on Academic Earth are the same ones on YouTube or on the individual Universities Open Course sites. Academic Earth acts as an aggregator and curator of the videos and presents them in a manner that makes them easy to find and embed. The Academic Earth videos offer a great way to present a survey of prerequisite material as a review before delving into your course’s more specific objectives.

The biology test:

Biochemistry I

Watch it on Academic Earth

 

Fora.tv

Fora.tv is another video aggregator that hosts discussions, panels, and debates with leading experts and researchers.

The biology test:

Genomics: Where Have We Come and Where Are We Going?

 

Big Think

Big Think also offers interviews with experts and deep thinkers. Big Think is different from Fora.tv and Academic Earth because Big Think offers original content that is available no place else.

The biology test:

E.O. Wilson on the Century of Biology

 

TED Talks

If you haven’t ever taken a look at the TED Talks make some room on your calendar to have your mind blown. TED is an organization known for its annual conference on “ideas worth spreading,” an invitation-only event that asks its speakers to give the “talk of their lives.” Since 2006, the Talks have been available online. While originally focused on technology, entertainment, and design, hence the name TED, the Talks scope has expanded and includes a wide array of subject matter including business and science.

The biology test:

Robert Full: Learning from the gecko’s tail

 

The Daily Show

Did you know that every segment from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report is online and keyword searchable? How is Jon Stewart educational content? Finding an interview with a popular author or finding a humorous piece that’s related to your course is a great way to build a connection between your students and the materials and to create a “lean-in” moment.

The biology test:

Doing a quick search for “biology” on the Colbert Web site yielded this great interview with author Stephen Johnson.

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Steven Johnson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Religion

I Retired My USB Drive

I have three office locations, four if you include my home office, and it’s quite common for me to find myself working on the same files in multiple locations on any given day. I’m not a fan of lugging around my laptop everywhere, so until recently, I would carry around a two-gigabyte USB drive and keep my current files on it. It worked great except for the times I would forget to bring it with me, misplace the drive, or accidentally drop it down a sewer. Hey, it happens.

However, the days of losing files to the Chicago Streets and Sanitation crews are over, thanks to Dropbox. Dropbox offers two gigabytes of free cloud storage. Once you install Dropbox, any file that you add to your Dropbox folder will automatically be synced and available on any other computer you have installed Dropbox on. There’s no need to e-mail yourself a file again. Just have Dropbox sitting on your desktop like any other folder and drag and drop the file you’ll need at another workstation. That’s it. You’ll have it when you need it.

Now what happens if you are on a computer without Dropbox installed? No worries, since its cloud storage, everything is available on the Web. Just log on to the Dropbox site to have access to all of your files.

Dropbox also includes a public folder that opens up some of your cloud storage for easy sharing. Put a file that you want to share in your Dropbox public folder, right click, select Dropbox, and then click “Copy public Link.”

dropbox1.jpg

Now you have a URL link in your clipboard that you can paste into an e-mail or IM conversation in order to share the file with others.

That’s just a bit of the functionality of Dropbox. I can’t recommend it enough. So retire your USB drive and come play in the clouds with me.

Twelve Web Tools of Christmas — 2008 Edition

It’s time for another edition of the twelve Web tools of Christmas, back by popular demand.  Each of these is a new tool, service, or piece of software that I’ve found useful in the past year.  But, since it’s the holiday season, each of these tools is also free.

  1. www.evernote.com — Evernote is the ultimate clipping application. It lets you clip files, screenshots, text, photos, and images on any platform, including phones, and keep those clippings organized, synced, and searchable wherever you are.  Evenote’s search functionality is really quite impressive. Evernote can recognize text in images, and that makes that text searchable. Looking for that photo with your friend in the Bon Jovi T-shirt? Just search for Bon Jovi, and you find the photo. On a more practical level, I use Evernote to take photos of receipts and invoices. It gives me an extra copy for my records and makes it much easier when I’m filling out reimbursement forms.
  2. www.skitch.com — Skitch is just a really easy, simple-to-use screen-capture and image-editing utility. You can grab a section of your screen or a shot from your webcam, highlight an area, add some text and quickly make images for tutorials or other learning materials. Like Evernote, Skitch is both an application and a Web service. That means the images you create are easy to share and embed on any site.
  3. www.slideboom.com — There are lots of services that let you share PowerPoint presentations on the Web, but I haven’t found one that does it as well as Slideboom. Unlike the other PowerPoint-sharing services, Slideboom doesn’t strip out any audio or video files you have embedded in your presentation. It also keeps any transitions and animations that you have built. In addition, any notes that you have added to a slide are included in Slideboom as closed-caption transcriptions. If you happen to be a Windows user, there is a free PowerPoint plug-in that lets you upload presentations to Slideboom directly from within PowerPoint itself.
  4. www.sproutbuilder.com — Need a simple mp3 player to put into your Blackboard class?  How about adding your Twitter feed to your faculty-information page? Spout lets you do it with no programming knowledge. Sprout is a Web-widget or “mash-up” creation tool. It lets you take content from other places on the Web, like a YouTube video, an rss feed, or a Google doc and create a mini-application that combines that information into one package. Here’s an example of a fairly advanced “Sprout” I built in about an hour. Note: Its been scaled down to from its original size to fit in the blog post

  1. www.animoto.com — As a video producer, I often get asked if I can take a series of photos from an event or seminar and create a promotional video. If I ‘m pressed for time, I let Animoto do the heavy lifting. With Animoto, you upload your images, your music track, add a little text, and—presto!—you have a professional and sophisticated slideshow animated to the beat of your music. Animoto offers free, all-access accounts for educators and students. The accounts keep videos private so any video created for a class assignment is freely available for everyone in the class but blocked to the outside world.
  2. www.ustream.tv — Speaking of events and seminars, Ustream lets you broadcast your event live to Web audiences. Plug in a camera to a computer, log on to Ustream, and you are broadcasting your event. Your audience can ask questions by using the chat functionality. It’s a great way to extend the audience of events and provide the campus experience to online students. There are other tools that allow for live Web broadcasting, but Ustream’s simple interface and ease of use gives it the edge over the competitors.
  3. handbrake.fr — HandBrake has been the best DVD-ripping software for a couple of years. However, HandBrake is now no longer limited to DVDs. The latest release accepts other video files as a source, which makes Handbrake a great, high-quality video-encoding solution.
  4. www.celtx.com — Celtx is an independent filmmaker’s dream come true.  It’s a scriptwriting word processor, a storyboarding tool, and a production calendar all rolled into one.  It lets video producers keep all of a production’s documents centralized and organized. Celtx’s online repository, Production Central, allows you to collaborate on production documents on the Web with your team and share best practices with other producers.
  5. feedly.com — I love Google reader.  It’s fast and efficient—but not that pretty. Feedly is a Firefox 3 plug-in that leverages the power of Google reader and makes it prettier. Feedly allows you to browse your feeds with the look and feel of an online newspaper and magazine. Feedly also adds functionality that’s not available in Google. For example, Feedly offers a one-click tweet feature that automatically adds a tinyurl address to the article, which makes sharing interesting articles simple.
  6. www.inquisitorx.com — Inquisitor is another browser plug-in. It becomes a part of your browser search box and makes searching faster and more elegant. Once it is installed, start typing, and Inquistor will start giving you search results and options before you are through.  Inquisitor also learns from your searching history and gives you results based on your past searches. The more it’s used, the better the search results you’ll get.
  7. http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/ — The final browser plug-in to make the list, Ubiquity has the most potential in saving time and making the computing experience more enjoyable. It’s an attempt to add natural language commands to browsing. Say you want to grab an address, map it, and then send that map to a friend. Normally, you would highlight the address, open Google maps, map the address, copy the link, and then open your e-mail and send the link to your friend. With Ubquity, you just highlight the address, launch ubiquity, and type “map,” “e-mail,” and your friend’s name. Its easier to understand the power of Ubiquity by seeing in action. Take a look at the video below.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo

  1. http://openid.net/  — OpenID is not a tool or a service but an initiative. Ever get tired of having to sign up up for multiple services with a myriad of user IDs and passwords? The OpenID plan is to have one universal ID for all of your Web services. Once you have an OpenID account with a provider you can use that username to sign on to other sites. Google has recently become an OpenID provider so if you have a Google ID or Gmail account you are already part of the program. When asked to sign up for a new service, look for the OpenID logo and just use your Google ID to sign in. Here’s a directory of sites that already accept OpenID accounts.

Textbooks 2.0

Up until now, the reports of the death of the textbook industry have been greatly exaggerated. Remember when the PDF was going to change everything? But this week, I have seen a couple of really cool stories that have convinced me that the traditional market for textbook is in its last days.

The first story is the preview of Plastic Logic’s new electronic-reading device, which premiered at this year’s DEMO conference. You can watch the five-minute demo below.

While similar to Amazon’s Kindle, which was launched last year, Plastic Logic’s e-reader is made from plastic instead of glass. That makes it lighter, thinner, and more durable. But what really sets it apart from the Kindle is that it’s open. The Kindle is a closed system. The only content I can read on a Kindle is content that Amazon makes available. That stinks. I want to determine what I read on my e-reader. I want to read my documents, my reports, my PowerPoint presentations. If I have a digital copy of a book, magazine, or textbook, I should be able to upload it to the e-reader. Plastic Logic lets me do that.

The second story that helped seal the fate of the textbook industry comes from WNYC’s On the Media. It’s an interview with Preston McAfee, an economics professor at the Californina Institute of Technology. Dr. McAfee was unsatisfied with the intro-to-economics textbooks on the market, so he wrote his own, and then he did something really cool. He licensed his textbook under the Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use the book for noncommercial use. Dr. McAfee hopes that other economists will add to the book, improving it, and thus create an open-source textbook. If it works for software, why not textbooks?

You can listen to the whole interview here:

I see the combination of these two ideas really changing the textbook industry. The e-reader eliminates the need for a physical object, and the Creative Commons open-source textbook eliminates the expense of the content. In addition, it allows faculty to create a textbook that is unique and tailored specifically for each individual class and that can actually be updated and revised during the quarter. It makes me want to go back to school.

What Can Online Educators Learn from Advertising?

When the final numbers are counted, online advertising is expected to have grown over 25 percent in 2007 to over $21 billion (BusinessWeek). Even a struggling U.S. economy and a looming recession don’t seem capable of stopping the party any time soon (www.clickz.com). One reason online ad spending has grown so rapidly is its ability to provide very detailed analytics. Online campaigns allow advertisers to gather very granular information on who saw an ad, when, how may times, and so on. Ad firms have whole staffs devoted to tracking online campaigns, evaluating data, and determining the effectiveness of the campaign. DoubleClick and Nielson/NetRatings generate millions each year helping to aggregate this data.

Ideally, online classes should be subject to the same level of analysis. Faculty and instructional designers have lots of tools to assist them with the planning and implementation of an online class but very little to assist them in evaluating the class and improving on it for the next quarter or semester. Data is often hard to get at (Have you ever tried to make sense of server logs?) and often there is not enough time and resources to produce a meaningful report that provides any insight.

That’s why I am excited by the Backlot Content Management System by Ooyala. Designed as a video-ad-campaign manager, the system allows you to quickly generate really useful reports that will be extremely valuable to online educators. Backlot lets you see how many times a video was watched, how much of it was watched, how many students watched it, how many times students replayed the video, etc.

backlot.jpeg

The reporting interface is easy to use, and Backlot includes a download-to-Excel feature should you want to slice and dice your data even more. It beats trying to decipher server logs. I think it can be a huge asset in allowing educators and researchers to truly determine the effectiveness of video in online classrooms.

The 12 Web Tools of Christmas

If you are like me, you come across dozens, if not hundreds of new websites a year, each offering some new tool or web 2.0 service that is sure to revolutionize the way your surf the web or do your work. Most are just neat little gimmicks or don’t fit into your workflow. However, there are some I’ve run across this year that I found to be quite useful either for personal or professional use. And without further ado, I give you the 12 Web Tools of Christmas.

DropSend1) dropsend.com — Do ever need to email a large file like a high-resolution photo or video clip? Don’t want your email to hang-up for 30 minutes, only to reject the file and force you to start all over? With DropSend, you can send files up to 1 GB with ease. A free account also gives you 250MB of online storage.

Buzzword2) buzzword.com — Buzzword is hands down the best online word processor I’ve ever used. The interface is clean and elegant. Adding images and tables is easy, its collaborative tools are very slick, and it handles pagination and typography better than Google Docs and Zoho. Adobe recently acquired the company that developed Buzzword, so look for them to put their muscle into Buzzword’s future development. (I like Buzzword so much, I even used it to create the first draft of this blog post.)

EditGrid3) editgrid.com — What buzzword is for word processing, EditGrid is for spreadsheets. It’s the most “Excel-like” of the available online spreadsheets and if you are a power Excel user, then EditGrid is the only web app that could possibly meet your needs. Many Excel features, including sorting, charts, auto-fill, cell border, number formatting, cell formatting, import, export, freeze pane, text overflow, auto-fit row/column size, word warp, and cell comments, all work the same in EditGrid as they do in Excel with the exact same keyboard shortcuts. And since EditGrid is a web app, it’s easy to setup cells that retrieve data directly from the Internet. Also promising is EditGrid’s integration with the iPhone.

splashup4) splashup.com — Splashup is the closest thing to a web-based version of Photoshop—at least until Abobe releases the real thing. This little tool covers about 20% of the real Photoshop’s features, but they happen to be the ones I use 80% of the time. It connects directly to flickr and picasa for easy access to your images stored online. I just wished it saved working files as .psd instead of in its own proprietary .fxo format.

Scribd5) scribd.com — I hate websites that contain links to .pdfs and Word .docs. It’s annoying to have to download the file and open it another application in order to get one or two pieces of information. The more I have to repeat this process the more annoyed I get and the more likely I am to abandon the site and go on to something else. Scrbid prevents you from annoying me and other users like me. It allows you to upload your .pdfs and .docs and then provides you a flash document reader that you can embed in your webpage. Think of it as youtube for documents.

VectorMagic6) vectormagic.stanford.edu — This is THE TOOL if you need to convert bitmap images into vector formats. It actually works better than Adobe’s LiveTrace feature that is included in Illustrator. This little utility has allowed me to scale up logos for HD Video with a minimum of fuss.

ZamZar7) zamzar.com — Zamzar is another utility that has proven to be a real lifesaver. If you ever find yourself out of the office and away from your $1000 encoding software, zamzar will be your best friend. Zamzar is a Swiss-army knife of file conversion. It can convert from formats like DOC to PDF, PNG to JPG, and OGG to MP3. Name almost any two file types and Zamzar can convert one into the other. The quality of video file conversion is not the greatest, but when you are in a pinch, it’s good enough.

Miro8) getmiro.com — I love iTunes. It’s great. It’s the primary way I listen to music and find and download podcasts. However, iTunes was initially designed as an audio player and video has just come along for the ride. Imagine an iTunes that was designed from the ground up with video in mind. What would it include? Well, it would play multiple file types including MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, and Flash Video. It would handle HD files with ease and efficiency. It would support and download bit-torrent files. It would connect to any publisher with a video RSS feed. Take all this, add in social-site integration with Digg and del.icio.us, and you have Miro.

Box9) box.net — Box.net provides simple and easy to use online file storage and sharing, but’s that not all. You also get password protection for all shared files and integration with web apps like Zoho, and Twitter. Plus, box.net provides one-click posting to WordPress and LiveJournal with more apps and services being added all the time The first GB of storage is free with a wide range of pricing plans for additional storage and bandwidth. A box account is a real asset when you are on the road without a laptop of your own.

TokBox10) tokbox.com — TokBox is an online video chat client that you can embed in any webpage or blog. This has exciting educational potential, since a TokBox video chat session could theoretically be conducted from within a course in Blackboard.

wufoo-copy.gif11) wufoo.com — Wufoo let’s you quickly build pretty web forms and surveys and then embed them into your personal webpage. The data analysis tools look nice too. The free account gives you 3 forms with up to 100 entries a month.

Flock12) flock.com — Flock is the web browser for users devoted to their social networks. If I were a big Facebook user, Flock would be the only browser I would use. Flock’s ability to keep track of your contacts, online accounts, social bookmarks, and stored media and keep them all in easy reach is the best thing to happen to web surfing since tabbed browsing.

And here’s one more tool for a Happy New Year…

Twinetwine.com — What is twine? I have no idea. Apparently it is social bookmarking meets wikis meets YouTube with a layer of artificial intelligence keeping everything just a search tag away. It’s the first true semantic web application! (Whatever that really means.) I recommend you apply for a beta invitation because everyone will be blogging about it next year and you don’t want to be left out of the conversation. It’s 2008, the year of Web 3.0.

Outsourcing Subtitles

Running the video production team for IDD, I am often asked to include subtitles with the videos we create. However, we don’t really have an efficient workflow for producing subtitles and I am often unable to fulfill the request. I know we need to improve our ability in creating subtitles—not only to meet the demands of our diverse student body (students with disabilities, international students, etc.), but also to allow for text-based video-searching, which will increase each video’s value as a learning object.

Recently, I have asked some of our Graduate Assistants (GAs) to assist in producing subtitled tracks for our videos using a share-ware subtitling application. When you factor in software training, transcription time, proof reading, etc., it takes a GA two hours and 20 minutes on average to produce one minute of subtitled video. Once a GA was experienced with the processes and comfortable with the software, he or she could produce one minute of subtitled video in 20 to 30 minutes.

Last year, IDD produced 128 hours of original video content. In order to caption all of the videos we produced last year, it would cost us $215,050. (GAs make $12/hour.) Even if we used only experienced GAs, our annual cost would still be $30,720 and require at least two GAs dedicated to subtitling.

This past summer at the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning in Madison, Wisconsin, I was introduced to a company named Automatic Sync Technologies. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas uses Automatic Sync as its exclusive partner in creating video transcripts and subtitles. Through a web-based interface, users upload their videos to Automatic Sync receive a subtitle track and a full transcript three days later. At this point, all the video producers have to do is associate the subtitle tracks with their original videos and they are done. Automatic Sync pricing is based on the volume of videos you submit. The more you submit, the cheaper it gets. Captioning our 128 hours using Automated-Sync would have cost DePaul $17,114, a significant savings even at our most efficient production capabilities.

Outsourcing our subtitling work to Automatic Sync or one their competitors seems like a no-brainer. It’s cheaper than doing it in-house, produces a more reliable product, and lets our GAs spend time working on other valuable projects.

If your university or organization has an efficient and effective way of producing subtitles for video, I’d love to hear about it.

Video-Sharing Network Showdown, Part 2

Since my first post on video sharing, I’ve received suggestions for other sites that should be included in my evaluation of video-sharing networks. After reviewing these suggestions, I decided to add Viddler (www.viddler.com) to the list. With this addition, these are the 15 sites chosen to participate in the showdown:

For each evaluation category, each site will be ranked 1-15 (1 being worst, 15 being best) in each of the evaluation categories. Important or crucial categories will be given a multiple to give them extra weight in the rankings. The cumulative scores will be tabulated and the site with the highest score will be declared the winner.

Evaluation Criteria (with multiplier weight in parenthesis):

User Experience (3x): With regard to user experience, I am focusing specifically on simplicity. How easy is it to go from being a new user to uploading a video and organizing as needed? How many steps are involved in uploading each video? I rewarded sites with a clean interface and downgraded sites with a busy MySpace feel.

Sharing/Embedding (3x): Can the video be embedded in a web page or within a Blackboard class? Does the site provide the code (html or java script) to make embedding as simple as cut and paste

File Size/Storage Space (2x): What are the size and storage limitations, if any? Is there a limit on the number of videos that can be uploaded? Are you limited to a certain volume of uploads per month/week? Is the limitation based on upload file size or the encoded file size? Are videos limited to a certain length of time such as YouTube’s 10-minute limitation?

Ownership (2x): What are the sites terms of use and privacy policies? Are the terms of service easy to read and understand? Does the sharing service claim exclusive or partial ownership of the video?

Privacy (2x): Are uploaded videos available to the web audience at large? Can the videos be protected and only shared with a private group?

File Formats Accepted (2x): Does the video need to be converted to a specific format before it can be uploaded? How many file types (.mov, .mpg, .wmv, .rm) does the site accept?

Conversion/Encoding (2x): Are the files encoded to a file format that allows for optimal playback? Where does the encoding occur? Some sites require encode the video on your machine before it is uploaded. That allows for faster upload times but requires you the download the conversion software tool or applet. Does the site support encoding in multiple file formats?

Downloads/Full Screen (1x): Can viewers download the posted video to their computers? Can videos be played back in Full Screen or are viewers required to watch the video in a little player?

Site Management (1x): Is there any danger that the site will go out of business and the videos will be lost? Does the site have a stable and well-established ownership group such as Google’s ownership of Youtube or Yahoo!’s ownership of JumpCut? Does management seemed more focused on being bought out or on building a long-lasting product?

Extras (1x): In an effort to compete with the popularity of YouTube, several of the new sites are launching new features to allow for greater control and manipulation of the video. Are these features useful or just fancy window dressing to attract users? How stable is the new functionality? Do the features work across platforms (Mac & PC)? Examples Include:

  • Editing/Remix: Several sites now allow you the change or edit your uploaded clip and combine them with additional clips. This allows you to add new material or update your previously posted videos without having to re-encode. This keeps videos current and reusable.
  • Direct Recording/Post from a Camera: Allows you to upload directly from a web-cam or camera attached to a PC.
  • Viewer Interaction: You can create a room to watch and interact with other users while sharing your videos.
  • Timeline Tagging: You can tag the timeline of the video with keywords and/or comments. This is great for note taking.

Score Charts

Video Sharing Showdown Score Chart

Final Scores

  1. Viddler — 262
  2. Vimeo — 241
  3. Blip.TV — 223
  4. Eyespot — 211
  5. Veoh — 178
  6. YouTube — 175
  7. JumpCut — 175
  8. GoogleVideo — 173
  1. MotionBox — 142
  2. Veodia — 120
  3. VideoEgg — 110
  4. Dotsub — 108
  5. TeacherTube — 107
  6. ClipShack — 98
  7. Veotag — 77

Conclusions

The top four—Viddler, Vimeo, Eyespot, and Blip.TV—all scored over 200 points in the survey and are all excellent options for use in an educational setting.

Viddler’s strengths are excellent interface coupled with very useful and easy to use extra features. I thought the direct web-cam capture provided a simple way to leave quick video comments and instructions, but I was really impressed by the ability to add comments and tags within the video timeline. This provides students with a great way to manage notes. Viddler is also the only site that allowed full-screen mode functionality with embedded videos.

Vimeo came in 2nd and was the site that was the most fun to use. The ease of setup and uploading surpasses the other sites in the showdown. In addition, Vimeo allows you to set the size and settings of the video and generate the new embed code on the fly. Vimeo’s only limitation is its 250MB per week limit (about 50 minutes of compressed video). Compare that to Viddler’s 500MB per file limit with no weekly maximum and you can see it’s a serious drawback if you are posting lots of video or plan on pre-posting a large amount in preparation for an upcoming quarter or semester. If you remove the file size category from the review, Vimeo actually comes out on top. That’s pretty remarkable considering Vimeo provides very little in the extras department. In short, what Vimeo does do, it does very well.

Blip.tv was easy to use and had a wide array of features. Especially useful is the one-click distribution which lets you quickly post your videos to your blog or as an iTunes podcast. Blip also accepts every video file format you can throw at it, including real media and 16×9 aspect ratios.

Eyespot also had a clean and user-friendly interface. Its big advantage was the ease of use of its editing and remixing features. If that’s a feature you want, Eyespot is the best.

So, those are the best of the bunch and the ones I would recommend to faculty who are interested in using video in their online classrooms. If you any questions or comments about my rankings or want to know more about the sites I reviewed, feel free to comment on the blog or send me an email at rsalisbu@depaul.edu.