Belief in the Cause
At the University of Cincinnati, Tom Streeter has had a much differentexperience with faculty, who have been eager to get involved in hisStreaming Media Project. "People are willing to join the choir real fast,"he says. "Once they see it in operation, it's not a matter of ‘oh gee, howcan I use this?' It's ‘how much is it going to cost and when can you behere?' I'm a pretty lousy salesman, so it's an easy sales job."
In fact, Streeter, whose educational streaming project has grown steadilysince launching in 1999, sees streaming as a means of extending the reach ofinstitutions of higher education. He's a believer. "There's no way that wecan expect everybody to come to a traditional brick-and-mortar facility tosee this stuff," he says. "So at the graduate level, this holds the promiseof being able to get information and coursework or training materials outthere that change very rapidly."
At the undergraduate level, Streeter points out that streaming could beemployed to relay basic materials. Some of the classes now offered in onlineform through the University of Cincinnati Streaming Media Project requirestudents to watch lectures online, with the physical class time devoted toquestion-and-answer sessions only. "Why not offload those lectures into adigestible form that they can have at any time and then use that valuableface-to-face time in a question-and-answers period, in the place where thereal learning takes place?" Streeter asks.
In these courses, Streeter says, "the primary exposure to the material wouldbe by way of us. We did that for the first time last spring. It's athree-year project. We learned quite a bit the first time, so we'll try notto repeat those mistakes and make entirely new ones."
Some of the difficulties of reaching a student audience are purelytechnical, points out Andy Covell, director of IT at the Syracuse School ofManagement. Covell is the author of Digital Convergence: How the Merging ofComputers, Communications and Multimedia is Transforming Our Lives, and isin charge of technology applications at the school, where streaming has beena part of his work since 1996. The school offers "formalized course content"through the Caliber Learning Network, while Covell heads a variety ofstreaming projects on and off campus — for alumni, the corporate sector, andon-campus students.
"[Streaming] hasn't had the same kind of impact that, say, the Web did,"Covell reasons, "partly because streaming media doesn't provide a qualityexperience on a uniform, consistent basis. It can be difficult to work with.You have to have some tolerance for buffering and things like that."But for Covell, despite the technical challenges, streaming media haspotential to help enrich the contact between an institution and its remoteconstituency. "When it comes to outreach to alumni and prospective parentsand students, it's important. It adds a human touch to the interaction wehave with them. The first contact with people, that many people who areconsidering a university campus have, is through the Web."
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