Bringing technology into the classroom are, from left, Ariana French, instructional technologist; Derek Toten, director of instructional media; Susann Lusnia, assistant professor of classical languages; and Sheldon Jones, supervisor of instructional media. They are displaying digital recorders used to record Lusnia's course presentations and iPods, through which students can listen to those presentations.

"Who's going to come to class once I put my lectures on the Web?" is a common concern of instructors asked to post recordings of their classes on the Internet.

"Attendance is not going to change," says Derek Toten, director of instructional media, who this fall initiated a pilot program, called Tulane eNotes, to record audio of classroom lectures and to post the recorded files onto a student-accessible website. He adds, "The course-castings are study aides, not a substitute for attending classes."

"Most professors are initially skeptical," says Toten, but the concept is not new. He says recording university lectures goes back to the 1970s at some colleges. "Students today anticipate course recordings and are asking more often for access to them online."

The class recordings are available online from the eNotes' website. When a podcasting feature is added, Toten says, students will be able to subscribe to the service and have course files delivered automatically to their computers and portable devices.

For this fall's pilot program, Toten recruited eight instructors to record their lectures. Six of the courses they teach are entry-level and two are 300-level. The subjects include biology, chemistry, communication, French and history.

Susann Lusnia, assistant professor of classical studies, is participating in the pilot with her 300-level course "Etruscans and Early Rome." Despite a few technical glitches, such as not recording one day or a battery running down, she thinks the recorded lectures have been positive. In fact, she says, the students are asking her to record an upcoming guest speaker for their class.

"The audio recordings are a great resource for students to review," says Lusnia. She says she would not mind expanding the practice of recording to her other courses, though she says she would limit recording to lecture-based courses, since the present recording method would not lend itself to seminars.

The current pilot recordings do not usually capture students' questions and discussions in the class. Toten says they will likely test other microphone systems in a broader pilot during the spring semester.

Downtown, at the health sciences center campus, Craig Clarkson, professor of pharmacology, has been recording second-year lectures and posting them on the Internet. In his pilot program, also started this fall, he has included presentation notes with the audio files and is even offering some podcasts. He is waiting to assess the project through a survey at the semester's end, but is already getting feedback.

"When I do not post a lecture, I get e-mails from students asking for them," says Clarkson.

Not seeing a decline in attendance, Clarkson says, "I think students who want to come to class, come regardless." He says when the medical school was in its Houston post-Katrina year, he started posting PowerPoint files from lectures online. "Class attendance was the highest ever."