OneLab: Online education with minimal human supervision

Many educational institutes are recording classroom lessons to improve the students’ learning process. Unfortunately, a simple recording does not necessarily imply benefits. Indeed, when producing video lectures, there are different challenges that must be faced: production costs, accessibility, usability, video indexing, just to name a few. In this paper, we share our experience building ONELab, a system designed to capture, record, edit and stream video lectures. ONELab was designed to be scalable and to have low-cost implementation and maintenance. The system has been used in the 2017-18 Academic Year to manage the 49 courses offered by the five degrees available at our Department. In numbers, it supported 1,054 freshman students and produced 1,376 video lectures (for a total of 2,064 hours). The usage analysis showed that students appreciated the system and a comparative analysis between students who used the system and students who did not use the system, showed that the former passed more exams (+97.8%), had better grades (+8%) and acquired more credits (+105%).