In responding to a comment on the last entry, I answered the questions of what equipment and software I am using to create our online course materials:
For our College Algebra course, we cover the last six chapters from an Intermediate Algebra textbook. There will be a lecture for each section of each of the chapters. It looks like every full section lecture will be about 20 - 30 minutes in length. I am shooting a screen (or slide) one at a time which comes to about 10 slides or so per section. This post was one of those slides. Each of those slides ranges from 2 - 5 minutes in length. I think that comes to a total of about 27 lectures about 30 minutes each. I will probably have the students order a DVD with hi-res versions of the video, but post compressed versions on the web, maybe even as podcasts available through an RSS feed.
In terms of software, I am doing everything the hard way since I am on a PC. I hear this would probably be easier with a Mac. Nevertheless, I am mostly using free software. For the screen capture, I use CamStudio. I piece all the slides together using Windows Movie Maker. The software I use for writing on the screen is the software that was included with my tablet. My first choice would have been to use a tablet PC but the cost was prohibitive. Instead, I went with the WACOM Intuos3 tablet. We purchased the 9×12 tablet which works well, but is probably larger than needed. The Corel Painter Essentials software was included with the tablet and it worked quite well for the screen casting.
I hope this answers your questions. I got most of my ideas from a podcast I watched in iTunes by the name of “Is All About Math“.
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