One suggestion that I received from another student when I told them of my plan to take classes online was to investigate a product called 2xAV by Enounce.

In simple terms, what it does is speed up the playback of video streamed over the Internet. I was skeptical at first but the instant I used this product on a real class I knew I was hooked. It was the best $29.95 I spent. Videos can be played back at significantly faster rates with no loss of intelligibility.

To give you an idea of how valuable this feature is, consider that many classes offered at Harvard Extension are streamed via RealPlayer over a broadband connection and last around 2 hours per class. Each video section is about an hour long.

With 2xAV, I can regularly speed up my videos 1.5 times normal rate and watch those videos in 40 minutes. That’s about 80 minutes versus 120. For some classes where the professor has a particular slow style of speech, I’ve been able to speed up the video two times normal speed! That’s an extra hour!

The best part of this is that you find yourself actually getting more out of the videos because all of the distracting pauses are eliminated. You can’t drift off because the pace of the lecture keeps you engaged.

If you plan to do a significant amount of your coursework over the Internet, you owe it to yourself to investigate this tool. It works on Real and Windows Media codecs (but they are two separate products) and doesn’t require you to download the video to speed it up. It’ll work on streamed video.

If I’m honest, I wish the program (which is a plugin for your media players) was more robust. I encountered some minor problems the first time I installed it but was able to get it working in short order.

I also wish that they developed support for Flash video players. Harvard is experimenting with Flash-based streaming of videos and that doesn’t work with this tool. Unless they drop Real entirely, I’ll probably stick with the provided Real streams. I find that they look better at the higher bitrates and the usefulness of this tool is too much to ignore for some minor Flash convenience.

If you’re constantly looking for a way to cut down the time required to get through the lectures, you owe it to yourself to investigate this tool. I give it my endorsement.

2xAV Plug-in
Enounce