My job this morning was difficult to start with, a new faculty person, a mac user that I needed to train on how to run a windows box, start and stop a recording, and annotate using a touch board. I wound up spending most of the 15 minutes allocated to training trying to get the windows box operational. One of the student tech helpers suggested that they would call the their supervisor and I agreed. I was on plan B and C at that point. Faculty had come early and tried to login to the windows box using the wrong password and it had locked the user out after a number of failed attempts. So when I got there it wasn’t going to let me log in. So I rebooted thinking that another user was logged into the box. That didn’t work and time was running out so I used my own log in to access the box. But the box decided it needed a few minutes to start with my log in. Then the mouse froze. Another reboot. Mouse worked. My login worked. Loaded the powerpoint, initialized both lecture capture softwares, checked audio levels, and told the professor we were ready. I had 30 seconds to tell him how to use the drawing board and how to start the recording. I call back to our office to get confirmation of the primary recording stream. Video and audio are good. We are good. I walk out the classroom and the supervisor is there and wants to tell me that faculty should ask for help before trying to login. Right. Get back to the office and write the email that explains everything and how we will proceed and improve on the next class session. It all boiled down to faculty having no respect for the technology and blindly trying to take control of something they know nothing about, the windows box. And the supervisor wanting to somehow interface with faculty to do my job. And, somehow do it better. Without even knowing the specifications of the project.
You may wonder, why not run the recording on the mac? Well that was the supervisors idea too. So his graphs and fonts might work properly. Only a week in advanced I had told the faculty person to check his keynote to powerpoint presentations to make sure they played correctly before class. Every time I have tried Panopto on the mac, to record a lecture, it has failed. Why anyone would use a microsoft based program on a mac and expect it to run is crazy. Panopto is radically different in terms of interface between Mac and PC versions. Hell it has enough problems running on windows. You’ll have to trust me on this one.