Lecture Recording

Consolidation and expansion of lecture recording

Currently, over 60 lecture halls at the University of Bern are equipped with functioning infrastructure for lecture recordings (VLA), which are integrated into the peripheral systems of the university's teaching services via Opencast. This foundation already allows lectures and events to be recorded automatically and easily, making them available to students for review. Furthermore, the service itself, monitoring, and support have been significantly improved recently (e.g., the introduction of automatic subtitles), leading to a noticeable increase in quality for users.

Despite these advances, a heterogeneous picture emerges regarding the IT technologies and system solutions deployed in the various lecture halls across all locations. The historically evolved technological diversity makes the operation, maintenance, and further development of the teaching spaces extremely time-consuming and inefficient.

Another problem area is the financial planning and lifecycle management of the deployed hardware. Currently, no – or significantly insufficient – financial resources were firmly planned for the systematic replacement and amortization of the existing video recording equipment. Without such secured lifecycle management, the existing infrastructure threatens to become obsolete in the medium term or to impair teaching operations through unforeseen failures, which is why sustainable financing must urgently be established. This makes an urgent consolidation and harmonization of the video recording infrastructure essential in order to reduce maintenance efforts and further expand a future-proof, digital campus.