Pyramidia - An Integrative E-learning Tool

Nowadays, students need digital, highly interactive educational materials which can be accessed at any time in their original form. In the same time, lecturing seems to remain dominant form of teaching. This combined raises the importance to video record lectures. Pyramidia was created to satisfy both the students´ demands for interactive and easy-to-use material and the lecturers´ time and technological limitations. It is a software package that combines PowerPoint presentation with lecture video capturing. This allows students to re-experience the lecture at any time and anywhere. Pyramidia is a descendant of previous software developments and research in ICT use in education and has been used and tested through an entire semester of lectures for several courses. Pyramidia combines two strong elements into one lecturing system. The first one being the addition of variety of content and interactivity to existing PowerPoint presentations in an easy way that does not require much computer knowledge nor lecturer´s time. The second one is the video recording of a lecture, which helps students to preserve the lecture in its original form. This reduces the chance for students to miss any part of a lecture. It also significantly augments the potential audience of the lecture. This paper describes the Pyramidia application package, which helps lecturers to transfer knowledge to students, with an emphasis on lecture video capturing and combining it with additional interactive content.