University Business - June 2007 - (Page 66)

notes that university officials are looking forward to expanding the program. OWU’s exploration of rich media— which can be comprised of digital video, digital audio, or more commonly, a combination of both—is an excursion that many IHEs are undertaking. Less than a decade ago, there weren’t many applications that would allow a nonprogrammer to create multimedia, compress a file, stream it online, and then archive it. But with a wealth of new, easyto-use tools developed within the past few years, more and more non-IT professionals are creating their own rich media projects. Although there are still challenges when it comes to putting multimedia together, many colleges and universities are finding it’s easier than ever in this era of YouTube, GoogleVideo, and MySpace to create com- event would be recorded. Once the content is in the server, the media can run on any standards-compliant media player on either a Mac or a PC, as well as be played on devices such as cell phones or PDAs. Within the server’s system is QTSS Publisher software, which can manage the media in a more automated way than has been done in the past. For example, it takes only a few clicks to upload the content to the server, prepare it for streaming, and publish it to a website. Although the system has a number of advanced features, LaMar notes that there was a great deal of trial and error involved in learning to compress and optimize the video and tweak the multicasting—the process by which a single piece of content such as a football game is routed from one server onto many data streams. “We’re hearing that people from other teams and other universities are asking their schools, ‘Why can’t we have this?’ ” —Jason LaMar, Ohio Wesleyan University pelling rich media projects that win cheers for more than just the football team and that reach new viewers. Fan Base The initiative at OWU was envisioned as a high-profile project that would appeal to prospective students, giving them a flavor of campus life, and would give parents, alumni, and others the chance to see events they couldn’t attend in person. Once the institution made a commitment to begin streaming campus events such as sports, lectures, and music performances on its website (www.owu.edu), LaMar began developing the infrastructure and decided on using Apple QuickTime as the basic platform. The university already had a QuickTime Streaming Server in the IT department and Apple laptops that could be used, so LaMar simply had to connect a laptop to a digital video camera and plug into the audio equipment for the stadium, and the 66 | June 2007 “Apple QuickTime seemed the easiest to implement,” says LaMar. “But you still have to think about server infrastructure and how the connection is working. At this point, the tools are very advanced, but you do need some savvy on the technical end.” Learning how to archive was one crucial lesson, he adds. Rich media files aren’t like Microsoft Word documents; the file sizes can be huge, necessitating a great deal of digital storage to be archived properly. The file size for every hour of footage is about 250 MB, LaMar notes. But shrinking the size of the image into a small viewing window has helped, he adds. “We’re hearing that people from other teams and other universities are asking their schools, ‘Why can’t we have this?’ ” he says. “That’s nice validation.” Rich media can also boost an IHE’s visibility beyond potential and current students, as DePauw University (Ind.) is demonstrating. As tools for rich media became more robust, the university’s director of media relations, Ken Owen, felt that snippets of streaming videos of visiting lecturers would make for ideal sound bites for the media. Having spent 18 years in television news, Owen had the journalistic instinct to know what material made for good radio and TV broadcasts, but until just a few years ago he didn’t have the rich media applications that could make lectures available quickly. Also using Apple QuickTime, Owen captures the speeches and puts them on a special section of the university’s website. It’s not quite as seamless as Owen would like, though, since there’s still some editing that needs to be done. He takes the file and uses a program called Cleaner 5 from Terran Interactive Media to go through each lecture and choose clips. The suite of tools prepares audio and video specifically for the web by encoding files for QuickTime and other formats. The use of rich media paid off recently, when the university was thrown into the spotlight during a situation involving the Delta Zeta sorority. After The New York Times ran a story about Delta Zeta allegedly ousting all members who were deemed unattractive or who were members of minority groups, the university removed the sorority’s DePauw chapter. The university president’s announcement was captured with rich media and put directly on the IHE’s site. From there, several media organizations, including the Associated Press, took audio portions and used them in news stories. “Because we’d recorded the announcement with rich audio, they were able to have clean, broadcast-quality sound,” says Owen. Another popular tried-and-true application is Adobe Flash, which is a classic in the industry and boasts significant feature enhancements that were added during the past few years. One of the main advantages of Flash is its ease of use, which makes it ideal for student-led projects, says Elizabeth Santiago, project manager for the Curriculum Innovation and Technology Group at Babson universitybusiness.com http://www.owu.edu http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - June 2007

Contents
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Editor's Note
Virginia Tech Coverage
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Admissions
On The Hill
Future Shock
Independent Outlook
Internet Technology
I Wanna Be Rich
Smart and Sustainable
Walking the Talk
Steering Toward Sustainability
An Organizing Principle for Colleges and Universities
News Shorts
News Shorts
It’s Not Easy Eating Green
Facilities Focus
The New Face of ERP
Document Management Across Campus
What's New
Direct Connect
Calendar of Events
End Note
Annual Directory of Higher Education Consultants

University Business - June 2007