The EDUCAUSE annual conference offers the best opportunity each year to spend time with educational technology companies in order to understand their strategic roadmap and how their plans and releases will impact our work on campus.

This year one of my main goals is to get a handle of where Apple sits in the presentation / lecture capture space. An Apple product for presentation capture would be extremely appealing, as it is easy to envision Apple delivering an elegant solution that ties into their existing iMovie, Quicktime, and iTunesU platforms.

Rapid authoring and distribution tools, of which presentation / lecture capture systems are a significant component, will emerge as the next disruptive innovation on campus. When students get the power to easily create, edit, publish, consume and interact with rich media presentations we will take a significant leap towards an active learning ideal. A related leap in the effectiveness of teaching and learning will be the ubiquitous capture and distribution of classroom lectures and discussions, combined with faculty using these tools to create one-off teaching modules and provide individual student feedback.

Rapid authoring, presentation / lecture capture, publishing and distribution platforms are merging. Simple, integrated systems that allow all the members of the campus community to create, record, publish and distribute learning materials will dominate over complex, costly, and fragmented tools. This space is wide open for innovation and the establishment of deep partnerships between educational technology companies and higher ed. institutions.

That is why I'm particularly interested to try to understand how Apple sees this space developing and where their product mix fits in to the trends identified above.

The Podcast Producer 2 site on the Apple page offers this description of the product:

"What is Podcast Producer 2? Podcasts are ideal for distributing university lectures, training a sales force, delivering product demos, or simply keeping employees, students, and customers up to date. Podcast Producer 2 simplifies the process of capturing, editing, and publishing them, letting your organization produce more podcasts with less work while maintaining a high degree of standardization among them. " (emphasis mine)

I'm unclear if Apple sees Podcast Producer as a lecture / presentation capture solution -- or one that is designed to work in conjunction with other platforms? It will be good to hear how other institutions are utilizing Podcast Producer. And I hope to leave with a better understanding of how Apple envisions its role in the move to democratized authoring and sharing of educational content, as well as the growth in lecture capture, within higher education.