Streaming Media - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 40) accounted for about 2,500 VOD or podcasts last year. Drexel is known for its online courses, but Morris says it’s still a struggle to educate faculty about the benefits of using streaming video. “We tend to approach things in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary[,] way. ‘If you build it, they will come’ is not true. The cutting-edge people will come because they will come to anything, but the people who are technophobic or are just not interested, they won’t come,” Morris says. He says the way to get professors on board is for students to pressure them, and his staff tries to deliver based on those preferences. “What we have tended to do is let students do the job in pushing the faculty in their directions because the faculty are trying to adhere [to] what students are looking for in content, richness and engagement and interactivity,” he says. Klenja agrees that it’s the students who drive the use of streaming video on campus, but he says a lot of it also has to do with the age of the faculty. “The whole online thing is student-driven, it’s not faculty-driven. We still have a significant number of faculty who aren’t doing the online thing, no matter what, no matter how, but we have a significant number of new faculty we are hiring every year who want to do video and occasionally we get more requests than we can handle in a reasonable amount of time,” he says. In fact, the college is building a $12 million Instructional Technology Center, and the ground has already been broken, Klenja reports. streaming video goes to college Tony Klenja says that though students at Daemon College have had no issues with Windows Media, he expects the “YouTube effect” to introduce more students who would prefer to see Flash Video for content like the live construction webcam shown here. Does Production Quality Matter? Do students and faculty care about production quality for classroom video? The answer depends on whom you ask, but the general consensus is that for most users, it doesn’t need to be television quality, so long as students can hear the Instuctors at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign are embracing video and rich media for courses lecture and see relevant materials, such such as this computer science class. as a PowerPoint presentation. But that’s not to say you can release just anything. You still need to have decent sound and lighting, no matter what the content product is that semester. We’re not going to throw a ton is, says Riismandel. “Production value is always important of value on it, but it’s still very important that students to them whether they realize it or not is what I learned. never have to struggle with video or audio in whatever We won’t turn out crap, so there is always a sophistication they are watching. The quality should be in service to in production. When we record every instance of a the content. It’s great when they say video looks great, class lecture, it’s ephemeral. The life of that video but better when they say the content is great,” he says. 40 STREAMING MEDIA December 2007/January 2008
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