Online Lecture

I've been shopping around trying to find a fairly easy way to combine audio with PowerPoint slides to post lectures online. I tried some movie-editing software, but that had some problems. Then I saw that Carl Zimmer over at The Loom used a piece of software called Soundslides. I thought I'd try Soundslides with a lecture I delivered recently.

(The lecture was to help inaugurate a new organization at UCSB called SUB - Society for Undergraduate Biologists. I was asked to speak about undergraduate research. I chose to talk about "paths to undergraduate research"; my own path, the path of one undergraduate from my lab, and the path that others might take to undergraduate research.)


I concur with Carl's comments that Soundslides is mostly nice, but determining the timing for when the slides change is a bit of a hassle. The quality of the slides ends up to be very high, because it uses jpeg graphics within Macromedia Flash, I gather. Other methods make a movie, and the graphics don't come across as well, or they take much more memory. Anyway, I post the result from soundslides below, which took me a few hours to complete. There is one more program I want to try that was recommended to me, I will try to post comparisons here, in case anyone is interested. After that, I want to buy the program I like best and then get many of my lectures from my Macroevolution course online, including lectures on the basics of phylogeny reconstruction. Then I just point students to the online lectures, retire from teaching, and focus on research (wink)...