Service Updates (June 2021)

The Echo360 lecture capture scheduling service has moved from Audio Visual to Academic Technology. This move will allow Audio Visual Services to better focus their resources on provision and support of in-room hardware.

Lecture capture scheduling is, predominantly, a data entry process whereby our team receive lecture capture scheduling requests via the online Help Desk, and then process them to set up the actual recordings in Echo360. The service is available Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm and we ask that all bookings are requested at least 2 working days in advance.

The service relies on the data provided by departments to ensure that captures are set up correctly. Therefore, we have created a ‘How to schedule a lecture recording’ guide which provides details for what the service does and does not do, prerequisites for making a booking, and which describes how to complete the booking form for different event types.

For those departments who use the spreadsheet booking method, we have provided a new version of the spreadsheet, pre-populated with room information and with an information sheet to guide you through the required fields (due to Echo360 updating their import process). We have also updated our ‘Getting Started with Lecture Capture’ and ‘Lecture capture-enabled spaces’ guides which provide information about the lecture capture process outside of scheduling.

Further work will take place over the summer to modify the online booking form to improve the process and better guide people through the steps to ensure that data is accurate and complete so that recordings can be scheduled efficiently.

Important dates

We are currently only able to set up schedules for 20/21. Please do not submit requests for 21/22 until the room bookings service is made available by the Central Timetabling team. We estimate that this will be from the start of August but are waiting on final confirmation from Central Timetabling.

The future of the service

We welcome feedback on the scheduling guidance, and on the way in which lecture capture scheduling works currently. We would especially like to hear from you if you are the local contact in your department who either sets up the requests, or who supports other people in making requests, so that we can keep you up to date with changes and work with you on developing the service so that it better meets departmental requirements.

Some future changes we are either working on, or looking at the feasibility of:

• Replacing the current spreadsheet with a ‘validated’ spreadsheet to reduce errors further.
• Video guidance for the scheduling process and completing the spreadsheet.
• Developing the booking form to have more pre-populated data to reduce errors.
• And in the longer term, self-service scheduling, whether this is via room bookings, our in-house scheduling interface, or directly in Echo360 by trained administrators.

Please get in touch with either myself or Cameron with any suggestions, and requests for training or support in using the lecture capture scheduling service. Please submit all scheduling requests via the online form however so they can be picked up in our absence.

Paul Trimmer, Cameron Deans

(Lecture Capture Scheduling Team, Academic Technology)