An Online Education System to Produce and Distribute Video Lectures

Nowadays, the term “student” embraces people with different needs and lifestyles (e.g., people with part-time or full-time jobs, people with some forms of disabilities, etc.) and, in the attempt to reach out to these students, many educational institutes are recording and releasing classroom lessons. In this paper, we share our experience building ONELab, a system designed to capture, record, edit and stream video lectures. ONELab was designed to provide flexibility to educational contents (i.e., no time and geographical constraints) and to improve the students’ learning process. Moreover, the system had to be scalable and cost-effective. The system has been used in the 2017-18 Academic Year to manage the 49 courses offered by the five-degree programs available at our Department. In numbers, it supported 1,251 students and produced 1,376 video lectures (for a total of 2,064 hours). The usage analysis showed that students want to adapt the learning process to their lifestyle and showed that students who used ONELab acquired more credits (+119%) and had better grades (+9.4%) than those who did not use the system