流媒体教育

While streaming media has not yet achieved BMOC status at colleges and universities, it is no longer a wet-behind-the-ears freshman plebe. Many schools have caught on to streaming media and tried it, and now they are ready to take it to the next grade level.

这就是拉马尔大学的情况, 马里斯特学院, 西雅图社区学院, and on the main campus at Sandia National Laboratory (an institution of higher learning, 如果不是大学本身的话). Each has adopted streaming video and is currently advancing its use. 但每所学校都在采取不同的方法, using different tools and formats as befit its unique needs. 这些学校正在实现不同的目标, 享受不同的成功, 在这个过程中我学到了很多东西.

拉马尔大学
成立于1923年, 拉马尔大学’s attractive 270-acre campus in Beaumont, 德州, sits 80 miles from Houston and 40 miles from the beaches of the Gulf Coast. 在平时, 学生们可能会喜欢这个靠近海滩的地方, 但在极端天气下, 他们可能不这么认为. One such time was September 24, 2005—the day Hurricane Rita hit the campus with a fury. Of the university’s 155 buildings, 80 percent received hurricane damage. Particularly hard-hit (due to a roof collapse) was the building that was the central site for the school’s telephone and networking services equipment. It was also at this time that Lamar’s IT department was just beginning to implement its Enterprise Video Communications (EVC) project, at the heart of which was a suite of video applications provided by Media Publisher, 公司. (MPI). Obviously, the project had to be put on hold while the university cleaned up and rebuilt. 即使在今天, some buildings still have temporary roofs and progress on the EVC has slowed a bit, 但拉马尔还在继续前进.

It wasn’t long ago that Lamar was still providing video-based instruction to local K–12 schools by mailing them VHS tapes. 该大学使用H.323 point-to-point videoconferencing technologies from Polycom and VTEL for most of its distance learning ventures. Live webcasting was limited to things like the university president’s convocation, 金·艾伦说, 拉马尔的数据主管, 的声音, 视频网络.

An early project that showed Allen the power of streaming was a webcast she and her staff did for the 德州 state comptroller’s office. State employees came down from Austin for training, but since the only classrooms available were limited in size to only 12 people, 该大学决定对此次活动进行网络直播. "Being able to broadcast the event live meant we didn’t have to worry about class size anymore,艾伦说。. “再加上财务部门的人, 例如, could still have coverage at the desk and watch the video live there at the same time that the other people were experiencing the training live in the classroom." Lamar also archived the event for later on-demand viewing.

在风暴之眼
Allen and her IT staff also wanted to try to leverage the infrastructure investment the school had made in a Cisco Content Delivery Network that had gone mostly underutilized. (Early uses of video in the classroom consisted mostly of instructors showing students news clips from CNN or Fox 新闻.)所以拉马尔决定实施MPI系统. In the midst of the implementation, along came Rita. 除了造成破坏, the hurricane brought new urgency to the need for efficient communications.

"While Lamar was recovering from the devastating effects of hurricane Rita, it needed to find a cost-effective way to provide diversity in training and integration of technology in both employee education and in the classroom,艾伦说。, who lists Lamar’s other general reasons for implementing system-wide video:

—Growing demand from faculty to include video in their courses as well as archive classroom sessions
—Need for a management system to centralize existing video assets and allow users to easily locate, 发布, 并重新使用它们
—Desire to enhance faculty-to-faculty communications leveraging live video
—Desire to enhance employee education and training opportunities with video content delivery
—Desire to enhance communications with students related to available technology.

2005年12月, Lamar began working with Media Publisher to implement enterprise video to support four key applications, 包括视频点播(VOD)出版, 存档课堂课程, 管理视频库门户, 以及教职工交流. Lamar integrated Media Publisher’s suite of enterprise video applications with its existing Cisco Content Delivery Network, as well as elearning applications from SunGard SCT and webCT. Maintaining the system is the responsibility of Lamar’s IT department, which has a staff of 52.

"We wanted to have some place that would serve as a central video courseware repository, 我们可以控制进入的地方, and we wanted to do some reporting to see who viewed it when, 能维持多久, 以及他们是否完成了任务,艾伦说。. "Our IT division is broken up into five different departments, 他们所有的训练需求都是不同的. So we needed to be able to manage diverse courses and diverse content."