Dr. David R. Feeney, a reader, has emailed me about “TUCAPTURE,” the nation’s first large-scale, automated “academic capture system,” created by Fox School of Business at Temple University, in collaboration with media publishing giant ANYSTREAM. As described by Feeney, the Director of Digital Education at TU:

The TUCAPTURE system automatically records every minute of audio, visuals, even video from every meeting of selected courses, for immediate webcast and podcast. Since July 2004, TUCAPTURE has spread across disciplines, colleges and campuses, giving thousands of users 24/7 access to ”class captures” via Internet, IPODs and more. Today, TUCAPTURE hosts more than 250,000 minutes of classroom recordings, with 4000 fresh minutes captured weekly from a growing number of TU classrooms, courses, seminars and events. TUCAPTURE offers the most minutes of streaming classroom media of any system of its kind in the country–more than Harvard, Princeton, UPENN, or MIT’s celebrated OpenCourseWare system. It has accomplished all this without new staff hires, exorbitant budgets, or tedious faculty training or tasks. Surveys of TUCAPTURE users show high satisfaction, and suggest benefits to teaching and learning. Specifically, 80% of users said TUCAPTURE improved student learning, 70% of users said TUCAPTURE improved classroom teaching, and 95% of users said they would choose a class with TUCAPTURE over a class without it.

Feeney makes some impressive predictions about the system’s potential, some of which have relevance for higher education reformers:

We predict that automated capture, release and “recycling” of recorded classroom minutes will have profound impact on education. We are looking for significant differences in college attendance, retention, completion, and learning. Importantly, TUCAPTURE can serve as a new resource for analysis and reform of education. Emerging “academic capture systems” like TUCAPTURE are poised to offer convenient, automatic review of what parents, students, and taxpayers are paying for… the dynamic interaction of the real college classroom.

For more information, including examples of TUCAPTURES, visit here.