(Web) LectureScribe

LectureScribe is a simple web-based application (available here) that allows you to record handwritten "whiteboard lectures" along with audio to produce light-weight instructional videos that can be easily viewed on any web or mobile platform. Here is a short example video explaining some of its features.

The program was written by Brian C. Dean, an associate professor of computer science at Clemson Univeristy, to develop supplemental instructional content for his courses and for an upcoming algorithms book.

Please feel welcome to make use of the program for your own instructional needs. The web version of the program is fairly new so please let me know if you encounter any issues with it. I'm always interested in hearing about use of the program by others, so if you use LectureScribe in your own classes, please feel welcome to let me know or to send me an example video!

The application should be easy to figure out -- mostly just click record and start writing and speaking, clicking stop when done. Clicking ? or pressing ? will give you a list of keystrokes; the program is most efficiently used if you know these keystroke shortcuts. For example, if you mis-speak, then press B to back up 3 seconds, P to play up to the point of the error, S to stop, K to kill from that point on, and R to start recording again. You can also switch between pen and pointer modes and change colors using convenient keyboard shortcuts.

Lectures are stored as a pair of files: a .wav file for audio and a .lsv file for video. When you save, you will be prompted to save both these files. When you load, you will need to select both of these files (hold down CTRL while clicking on them in the file open dialog box). Please feel welcome to transcode your audio into a more efficient format (e.g., .mp3) to supply to the viewer, although you still need the original .wav file for editing.

The authoring tool seems to run properly in Firefox and Chrome. It doesn't work in Internet Explorer (although videos produced by the platform are viewable in Internet Explorer).

The lecture canvas keeps expanding vertically as needed. Expansion only happens while stopped though, so if you are recording and run out of room, just stop temporarily to allow the document to expand and resume recording. Many editing features (e.g., select and delete/move, import image, add eyeball or reference) only work while stopped (by design).

I'd recommend recording short "mini-lectures", not super-long lectures, as these may stress your browser / system (if the browser runs out of memory, it can crash and you can lose your work!). Anything up to an hour or so is _probably_ fine; please let me know if you have issues recording longer lectures. There is a "reference" facility for creating multi-part hierarchical lectures.

When importing images, please only import relatively small image files, since these get bundled up with your video and can cause very slow downloads during viewing otherwise.

Due to the "same origin" policy in JavaScript, you need to host your files on the same website that hosts the viewer program wlsviewer.html (otherwise, the viewer will be prohibited by the browser from downloading your lecture from a different website). For example, to host a video named V.lsv with accompanying audio file A.wav, simply put these two files and the wlsviewer.html web page (which you can download in zipped form here) in the same web directory and use the URL wlsviewer.html?video=V.lsv&audio=A.wav

I've tested viewing on a few mobile platforms and it seems to work ok; mobile devices tend not to "auto-play" audio content though, so the user usually needs to click "play" to start the video. Any mobile issues: please let me know, although bear in mind that getting perfectly consistent playback across every known device can be quite a challenge!

Closed captioning is available by loading a transcipt in SubViewer format, much like with YouTube (see the YouTube instructions here for an example. You can also export the caption data from a lecture if needed (e.g., if you want to pipe it through a translator to make subtitles in other languages).

I'd recommend saving fairly often, as any glitch that causes your web browser to crash or re-load the page will lose un-saved work.

The original version of Lecturescribe, written nearly 15 years ago, was a Windows app that exported videos in Adobe Flash (.swf) format, which becoming less-widely supported. I've kept the old version available here for those who need it, although I encourage you to move to the new version instead (n.b., files from the old version are not compatible with the new version).