An autonomous low-cost studio to record production-ready instructional videos

Producing high-quality educational videos usually requires a large budget as it involves the use of expensive recording studios, the presence of a technician during the entire recording session and often post-production tasks. The high costs associated with video production represent a major hindrance for many educational institutions and, thus, many teachers regard high-quality video recording as inaccessible. As a remedy to this situation, this article presents SAGA (Autonomous Advanced Recording Studio in its Spanish acronym), a low-cost autonomous recording set that allows teachers to produce educational content in video format in an agile way and without the need for post-production. The article provides an overview of SAGA, including a description of its hardware and software so that anyone with basic technical knowledge can replicate and operate the system. SAGA has been used to record more than 1,500 videos including the contents of six MOOCs hosted on the MiriadaX platform, as well as four courses at UPM. SAGA has been evaluated in two ways: (1) from the video producers’ perspective, it was evaluated with a questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model, and (2) from the video consumers’ perspective, a questionnaire was conducted among MOOC participants to assess the perceived technical quality of the videos recorded with SAGA. The results show a very positive general opinion of the SAGA system, the recorded videos and the technical features thereof. Thus, SAGA represents a good opportunity for all those educational institutions and teachers interested in producing high-quality educational videos at a low cost.