Futurewatch 2009: Big Opportunities, Big Challenges in Educational Video

This brings me to another big trend I see developing in the new year: the convergence of telepresence and streaming. While I kind of hate this new, manufactured buzzword "telepresence," it nevertheless serves as an umbrella for a bunch of related technologies, such as video chat, VoIP, and videoconferencing. In the past year we’ve finally seen these technologies go from being bleeding edge—and barely bleeding working—to being platforms that are stable enough to rely on for distance and blended learning. Videoconferencing has been used for education in the U.S. for more than a decade, especially to link up schools in remote rural areas in the West. But the classes tend to be ephemeral, unless they are recorded to videotape or DVD. Web conferencing platforms such as WebEx and Adobe Connect have offered similar conferencing ability, with a focus on rich presentation visuals usually combined with conference calling over traditional land lines, but this also offers limited recording functionality.

Now that the VoIP and video functionality of online conferencing platforms have finally become usable and reliable, their ability to record conferences becomes all the more valuable. At the same time, the major players in the videoconferencing arena, Polycom, Tandberg, and Cisco, are offering solutions to record, manage, and stream content as well. This mirrors the growth in lecture recording in the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom. The quantity of educational content recorded in the physical or virtual classroom will continue to grow quickly, if not exponentially. As a result, the need to catalog and manage all this stuff becomes even more crucial.

Nearly all of these platform vendors—whether the platform is videoconferencing, web conferencing, lecture capture, mobile streaming, or podcasting—offer a content management solution. What worries me is the proprietary nature of these catalogs and archives. If your school or institution can standardize on a single platform for all of your media needs, this is less of a concern—that is until you realize that your students aren’t able to access content with a particular browser, wireless network, or device. The even greater concern is what happens if a particular vendor goes belly up or if your school can’t afford to keep up with version upgrades.

The question of standards always looms large over the online video world. Whether it’s mobile, downloaded, or streamed, you don’t want your content locked up in a format that might not be watchable or editable down the road. Open standards is also the key to archiving and cataloging media created in different platforms. The value of classroom lecture videos and videoconference recordings only increases when they are available across multiple devices—including mobile—through a single catalog and interface.

In 2009, I certainly hope we’ll see more platform vendors support standard formats, such as H.264, and open metadata standards. As the iTunes music store and YouTube have demonstrated, having common portals for finding video content offers immense value to students and the general public alike. However, as of yet, content in iTunes is invisible to someone searching YouTube and vice versa. Students shouldn’t have to make the academic equivalent of the iTunes or YouTube, Coke or Pepsi decision to get their curricular content. They shouldn’t have to go through multiple portals or interfaces to find content from different classes—that’s just asking them to ignore the stuff that is less convenient to access.

It’s an exciting time to be working in educational media, but it’s also a critical time as we make decisions on platform, content, format, and management that may well determine the equality of students’ learning for years to come.