The lecture capture market is estimated at $50M/year in higher education and is likely to triple over the next 6 years. That's a lot of money to be spent, and a lot of lectures captured. Now, as it so often does, the higher education IT community has created an open-source alternative. But can universities save money with it?

“If you look at research on the total cost of ownership for servers running applications, about 80 percent of total cost of ownership is from ongoing management and maintenance,” says Michael Berger, director of marketing at Tegrity, which offers a hosted lecture capture service that starts at $10,000 for 250 hours. “You can make it do just about anything you want,” says Burns, of Panopto. “But you have to put a lot of quarters in the slot.” This is especially true, the providers say, if you want to deploy it in a lot of classrooms.

Such is the refrain of the commercial establishment. But Hochman, the Matterhorn project manager, says that while it does cost money to build and maintain the open-source system, the price is not unmanageable, even at scale. He also says that although the commercial companies do add a lot of value by being able to troubleshoot errors quickly, the members of the OpenCast community are hardly slouches, and can advise on a problem in a pinch. And it is only a matter of time, he says, before some entrepreneurs make a business out of providing stable support to Matterhorn users, like Moodlerooms has for Moodle users.

Having holidays not equally spread across the five weekdays can lead to confusion and worse. And then there are snow days:

One way to handle the calendar is just to ignore it. Mondays are Mondays, Tuesdays are Tuesdays, and holidays happen when they happen. The beauty of this approach is that it’s intuitive, and it’s in line with what most of the rest of the world does. It allows people with commitments in multiple places to juggle them with relatively little additional nuttiness. That could mean students with jobs, adjuncts with courses at other schools, or even regular employees who need to schedule, say, dentist appointments well in advance.

The problem with that is that the number of class meetings will vary, sometimes non-trivially, depending on which days of the week the class meets. In lab sciences, say, losing multiple Monday lab sessions to holidays could put the students in a real bind relative to students who happen to have their labs on Tuesdays.