How to Manage Video Content in Higher Education
"Occasionally we have a faculty member who wants to take control of his or her media," Covell adds. Ensemble supports this functionality, too, even if it’s not a full-fledged user-generated video sharing platform like YouTube.
Development on Ensemble continues. Covell says he would like to see the platform "more easily integrate with video capture/creation platforms." The Ensemble team is also working to "develop appropriate APIs or other interfaces (e.g., XML-based import/export) that will enable easier integration."
Because Ensemble is now a commercial product, it’s available to other schools, colleges, and universities as a licensed software product or a hosted service.
Gallaudet University: Different Audiences Demand Different Approaches
Gallaudet University takes a hybrid approach to managing online content, using commercial as well as home-brewed solutions. It’s something Gallaudet takes very seriously due to its unique responsibilities as the nation’s only university focused exclusively on educating the deaf and hard of hearing. Therefore, visual communication is a high priority at Gallaudet, into which video figures prominently.
According to Richard Goodrow, Gallaudet’s digital media systems engineer, the university has three different categories of online media content, each serving a different purpose: course videos, a public video library, and user-generated video.
For Gallaudet’s traditional on-campus students, the university has deployed the Apreso Classroom course-capture system—now known as Echo360—along with its content management capabilities. Course lecture videos perform an important function for Gallaudet’s students. "Our undergraduate population is majority deaf or hard of hearing," explains Goodrow. "It’s hard for them to take notes because most of our classes are in sign," making it a challenge for students to both watch the instructor and look down to write. Thus Gallaudet uses these course capture videos to function as "their note-taking utility."
Another important value to these course videos is the fact that American Sign Language (ASL) is not just a translation of English into signs—it’s a separate and unique language. When students take written notes in English they actually are translating from ASL. Being able to watch videos of their lectures saves students this translation step. "It allows students to rewatch lectures in their native language rather than a transcription in a second language," Goodrow explains.
To deliver these videos to students, Gallaudet uses Apreso’s ability to publish directly into Blackboard, the campus’ LMS. Course lectures are only intended for viewing by students enrolled in particular courses. Since Blackboard is based around a course model, it takes care of managing those access restrictions, providing media links to students based upon enrollment.
Only a small proportion of each semester’s course lecture videos are kept online for future viewing. The rest are stored offline, limiting Gallaudet’s need to provide online indexing and searching for all their course-related content.
However, that doesn’t mean Gallaudet doesn’t have significant content management needs. In addition to the university’s service to its undergraduate students, Gallaudet plays an important role in the nationwide deaf community. One aspect of this role is the Gallaudet Video Library (http://videolibrary.gallaudet.edu), which serves content of major importance to deaf culture and history.