Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The opencast community means quite a lot for us.
It’s of strategic importance for us. The technical systems for lecture recording
are very expensive and a lot of effort to build it
and the community is a means for us to share this effort
and build better and bigger things together.
The Opencast community is the reference community when it comes to webcasting for education.
We decided to join the Opencast when we began thinking about webcasting as one of our strategies.
We thought that the best we could do was to join a community with people with more
experience.
We see this as an opportunity to be part of a larger group of institutions.
We can, you know, leverage the expertise of many institutions
to take advantage of the programming skills and the user interface skills
and other you know like, just a lot of stuff that we don’t have at our school
and could never afford to have but yet we share a common need.
Even if we have a good and reliable system, we can’t build in every new technology
or changes that might arise during the next years.
We’ve gone through a lot of change and the field has gone through a lot of change.
And so by joining the Opencast community this is something we don’t have to do on
our own. It’s something that we can bring our learnings
from the past 10 years and share it with our colleagues,
and they bring their learnings and we hope that we’ll really
have something that’s much better and grander than what we can do on our own.
I see it as an opportunity for us to grow our services and our expertise
through being a part of this community. And also to see and have a good sense of a
roadmap for the future.
Many institutions are not thinking about or have no strategy
for adopting lecture recording, but students definitely want it.
And the big public audience wants some ideas about the school
and lecture recording or event recording is a perfect means
to give better support for students and public audiences.
We’ve seen that open source is a good way to provide professional development for your
staff. It’s a good way to really grapple with issues
that aren’t just technology issues, they’re issues that we all face in education.
One important thing to remember is that Matterhorn is one project within the Opencast
community. It’s the first project, and it is the platform
that we hope to then spawn off new emerging projects.
For example we have a research community that is very active in this area who is cultivating
their community of practice and also looking at
new projects and new proposals that will help to continue
to push this industry and this whole domain in
a way that I think will be incredibly valuable.
Our interactions with the Opencast Community at the University of Saskatchewan
have primarily been technical in nature. But we’re looking forward to getting more
and more involved with different media groups as well
and even looking at some of the pedagogical places for lecture capture.
One of my other roles at the University of Saskatchewan
is as a researcher in artificial intelligence in education
and lecture capture opens up a whole new area that we can look for semantics and adaptation
for video content for students.
Another example for research in this field of lecture recording
is of course we’re recording HD material which is really a huge amount of data
and in the sense of accessible versions there might be the chance
that we use this HD video and extract lip reading for example.
This kind of information goes much beyond where we currently are.
Another challenge has been the issue of open formats and
Opencast directly wants to address these issues and provide a force in which to promote this
kind of thinking. The proprietary formats have really held back
the industry, they’ve held back higher ed, and we want
to break through that so that we’re not wed to the proprietary
systems that are out there but also so that we have really solid archival
content that we can use into the future for scholarship
and for education.
One of the big benefits of being part of the Opencast community is looking toward the future.
This is a very dynamic field and sustaining and maintaining
your own system is ineffective in a number of ways,
both from a basic cost perspective and also from an innovation perspective.
And so by being part of a larger community we hope to really be able to enhance and sustain
a very dynamic system into the future.