iLecture Support
iLecture was developed by the Information Commons Production Services Team at the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences of the University of Iowa . Basically, iLecture takes a PowerPoint presentation, transforms the slides into .jpg images, records narration from a microphone, and outputs a web-ready lecture. iLecture uses the MP3 Encoder LAME for audio compression. iLecture utilizes SMIL (Simple Multimedia Integration Language), an open standard specification of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) supported by Apple's QuickTime. iLecture outputs content that can be played within any web browser that can view QuickTime formats, which the user can download for free from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qt/. QuickTime is Apple Computer's multi-platform, industry-standard, multimedia software architecture. The output of the program is basically a folder that contains all the image and audio files, a .mov file and an html file. The user can upload the entire folder onto a web server and publish the presentation.
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| Step 1: Start New iLecture Presentation |
1: Have your PowerPoint presentation ready and narration script prepared.
2: Start iLecture.
3: Select from the drop down menu File>New Presentation or click the new presentation icon .
4: Choose your PowerPoint file when asked by the popup dialog. iLecture will convert the PowerPoint slides to .jpg images. At this time, a folder is created by the program that will contain all the relevant files for your presentation. The naming rule for this folder is as such: if your PowerPoint file is "lecture1", the presentation folder is "lecture1Presentation".
5: Slide titles are shown in the left pane - Table of Contents. You can select a slide title to show the slide. Slide titles are based on what you have named those slides in PowerPoint.
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You need to have your microphone ready before recording any narration. The microphone should be plugged into your computer and the microphone volume should be adjusted to the correct level.
You will use the Recording Control Panel to record your audio.
Click the Record button, and you will begin recording from the first slide of your presentation. “Slide Time” shows the time spent on the current slide. “Total Time” indicates the time spent on the entire presentation so far.
Once you start recording, the Previous and Next buttons become active and you can use them to go backward or forward one slide. You can also click the slide image itself to go to the next slide. Note: once the recording begins, the slide titles in the Table of Contents are no longer enabled, meaning you can no longer navigate the presentation from these slide titles.
You can pause or stop during recording. When you click Pause, the recording pauses, and you need to either click Pause again or click Record to resume recording. When you click Stop, you will be asked "Do you want to continue recording?" Important! If you choose Yes, then you NEED TO CLICK RECORD again to resume recording. If you choose No, you can no longer record narration for this presentation at this time.
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| Step 3: Compress Presentation |
When you are done with your narration recording, you may want to compress your presentation to reduce the size of the recorded audio files. iLecture uses the MP3 Encoder, LAME to convert originally recorded .WAV files to .MP3 files. LAME is an open source software available at: http://lame.sourceforge.net/ . Although it is not required to compress your presentation for the Internet delivery, WE HIGHLY recommend you compress, especially when you have recorded for a long time. Compression can reduce the audio files to approximately half of their original size, meaning shorter download times for your audience.
To compress your presentation, all you need to do is to select from the drop down menu File>Compress or Click the Compress icon  Important! The compression process may take awhile depending on the size of the audio files.
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| Step 4: Save Presentation |
Last, you will want to save your presentation for later editing, for review, or for final delivery. To save your presentation, Select from the drop down menu File - Save As or Click the Save icon  . If you haven't compressed the presentation, iLecture will ask if you would like to compress it and save the compressed version of your presentation. The extension name for saved iLecture project file is .lec. iLecture requires this file to be saved in your presentation folder together with all of your audio and image files. Note: iLecture actually forces the .lec file to be saved in that particular folder no matter what folder you specified when saving it.
For information about what is in your presentation folder, refer to the help document: What is in it ?
Congratulations! You have created an iLecture presentation. For future editing, refer to the help document Edit Your Presentation . For online delivery, refer to Put it on a Web Server .
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| Preview Your PowerPoint Presentation |
You can preview your presentation once you have saved it. There are two ways of previewing it. You can choose from the menu Preview to preview your presentation in either QuickTime Player or in your default web browser. Or you can click  to preview in your default web browser.
You must have QuickTime installed to preview your presentation in either the player or in your web browser. If you don't have QuickTime installed on your machine, you can download it from http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qt/ .
Important! To preview your presentation, you must save it first either in narration mode or review mode.
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| Open an iLecture Presentation |
Once your presentation is saved, you can open it to edit it. Remember, your saved file has the extension .lec, and it is in the presentation folder created when you first started a new presentation . You can re-record narration for slides or delete slides. However, you cannot add new slides to a presentation you created in iLecture. The editor opens with the first slide in the Slide Image window. The following is a screen shot of an opened presentation in iLecture. Table of Contents list all of the slide titles, and the Image window shows the slide corresponding to the current selection. You can navigate through the slides, and click Play to listen to your recording for that selected slide.
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| Re-record for Selected Slide |
In the review and edit mode, you can re-record over one slide at a time. To re-record for a slide, you need to select it from the Table of Contents window and make sure that the slide image shown in the image window is the slide that you want to re-record. Click the Re-record button when you are ready. iLecture will confirm that you really want to re-record over the current narration.
If you think you may need a back-up of your original presentation, before opening and re-recording slides, make sure to make a copy of the whole presentation. For example, locate the presentation folder "lecture1Presentation." Make a copy of the folder and rename it to "lecture1Presentation_Backup" before you edit your presentation.
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You also can delete one slide at a time. Select the slide you want to delete and click the Delete button. iLecture will confirm that you really want to delete the slide and its associated narration.
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| Compress Edited Presentation |
Once you have made changes to the presentation such as editing or deleting, it is expected that you will compress the presentation again to reduce file sizes. Refer to the Compress Your Presentation section for compression instructions.
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When you finish editing, you should save your presentation to save any changes you've made. The procedure is the same as saving for a newly created presentation .
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The end product of iLecture is a folder that contains all the components of the narrated presentation, including the audio and image files, the html file and the QuickTime movie file which is actually a SMIL file. If you chose to compress your presentation, compressed .mp3 files are produced for all of the recorded .wav files. This compression will reduce the size of the audio files to about half, meaning less download time for your audience.
To publish, you simply need to upload this folder to a web server under your desired directory. Please ask for any assistance from your local web site administrator. By default, the name of the folder that is produced by iLecture is your PowerPoint presentation name plus the word "Presentation." For example, if you created a lecture based on the PowerPoint file "lecture1.ppt", then the folder name is "lecture1Presentation." In this folder, there is an html file named "index.html," that contains your presentation in QuickTime movie format and can be viewed on any platform or any browser as long as your audience has QuickTime installed.
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The simplicity and strength of iLecture is that the resulting presentation can be put on any web server running any flavor of web server software. You need to upload the whole resulting presentation folder to your web server. Contact your web server administrator for necessary information or assistance uploading.
After the presentation folder has been uploaded, you need to tell your audience the URL to access your presentation. For example, if your presentation folder "lecture1Presentation" is uploaded under directory "\lee\lectures\" on a server with domain name "www.yourdomain.com", then, the URL to access your lecture could be "http://www.yourdomain.com/lee/lectures/Lecture1Presentation/index.html" depending on your server's naming convention. Talk with your web serve administrator for details or assistance. Of course, you can change the name of the folder and the html file to anything you want, so long as you keep your audience informed.
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