Streaming Media - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 36) The fact remains, however, that although many colleges have been delivering streaming video in various forms for many years, there are still many obstacles involved in distributing video in a heterogeneous environment such as a university. Video advocates must continually work with (sometimes reluctant) professors to understand the power of video and to find a simple way to deliver it to students who are using a variety of equipment, software, and internet connection speeds. In addition, a university setting may have political wrangling over formats and delivery methods that IT pros simply wouldn’t face in a corporation. That means video streaming video goes to college administrators have to find a way to deliver video to students in a manner that satisfies these many different constituencies—no easy task when some students and professors defend their operating system choices with religious fervor. Despite all these obstacles, streaming video has thrived in the university setting, and as time marches forward, it’s apparent the use of streaming video in higher education will increase. Cue the Video One trend pushing video into higher education, Sonic Foundry TAKES A HARD LOOK AT Video in Education As Sonic Foundry VP of education Sean Brown sees it, higher education has been looking for a simple way to take advantage of the (increasingly) wired classroom. His company built Mediasite to fill that void and provide a way to capture and then deliver video and related digital content. Rather than only looking at the problem in terms of format or delivery, Sonic Foundry was looking at finding a way to simplify content capture. What they came up with is an appliance with three inputs: camera in, audio in, and VGA in. The common language—the lingua franca—was the video cable. Instructors were comfortable interacting with an audience by connecting their laptops to a projector via VGA cable. Brown says this simplified the process because the professors didn’t have to do anything they weren’t doing already. What’s more, the appliance includes a piece of software that communicates with back-end web servers to serve up the content in real time (or later on-demand). Brown explains that the appliance takes the input from the three sources and encodes the content, then creates a navigable piece of content, all on-the-fly using the Mediasite Server software. “You can administer the content and give it a name. For instance, if the professor is in biology, his content will appear in our portal in the biology catalogue or area,” Brown says. Unlike many systems today that require the professor to post the PowerPoint (or other digital content) to the Learning Management System (LMS), the Sonic Foundry solution includes any digital content as part of the presentation, providing a handy way to navigate the content. “Prior to our invention, the PowerPoint was a separate object, and the professor typically posted this [to the LMS] with the syllabus. Our system doesn’t work that way. The web page you watch has your entire conversation in the left frame, and next to you in a frame are images of your slides [that accompanied your presentation], not the slides themselves. What you have on screen is a VGA perspective if what has been captured and each image transition becomes a navigation point in the web page,” Brown says. This means if the professor showed 30 slides, there will be 30 thumbnails, each one representing one slide in the presentation. If the student wants to fast-forward to a particular slide, it only requires finding the appropriate slide—for example, the thumbnail of a graph—and clicking that image to view the video synchronized with it. What’s more, it doesn’t have to be a PowerPoint. Whatever the VGA source content—whether a slide under a microscope or a journal article in a doc viewer—the Sonic Foundry solution converts this to individual images, which the student can use to navigate in the lecture or presentation. From the student perspective, Brown explains, the content plays Windows Media in an embedded player. Brown says this approach solves both the capture and the presentation of the content with little or no intervention on the part of the professor or the video administration staff. He says there are no complex plug-ins or fat clients for students to deal with. It may not be the perfect solution for everyone (especially with its reliance on the embedded Windows Media Player), but it will solve video delivery and capture issues for those universities looking for a unified solution. 36 STREAMING MEDIA December 2007/January 2008
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