How to Manage Video Content in Higher Education

For its Video Library, Gallaudet uses North Plains Systems’ Telescope Asset Management platform. Primarily used by such enterprise customers as HarperCollins and Warner Bros., Telescope is a fully featured system that provides rich management of user permissions and copyright. Goodrow admits that Telescope "isn’t cheap by academic standards." Gallaudet was able to deploy this platform because of a 2005 software grant given by North Plains Systems and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Gallaudet has almost 200 hours of video content in its Video Library, ranging from videos of deaf people signing in 1915 to episodes of a PBS/Discovery television show called Deaf Mosaic. As Goodrow lays out, for this type of content Telescope provides the crucial ability control rights for each individual asset so that Gallaudet "can serve the general public’s needs while still respecting copyright holders' wishes."

As if that wasn’t enough, other video content is being created and used across campus. Increasingly Goodrow is finding that students are recording their own video assignments for courses. "Laziness," he maintains, "is the hallmark of a good programmer." So after being asked a few times to upload streaming videos to the university’s servers, he decided to flex his programming muscles and to develop a system to make the task easier.

Goodrow calls the system MyMedia. It allows any member of the campus community with a Gallaudet email address to upload streaming media through a web interface and get code to embed that content into any website. Importantly, the MyMedia system also accepts caption files so that the resulting video streams back with captions embedded.

MyMedia doesn’t keep a central catalog of all uploaded media files. Managing the links to content is the responsibility of the user. Nevertheless the system has been very popular with the Gallaudet community. Goodrow says the university’s television production unit has especially taken to MyMedia, allowing them to easily upload and stream the videos they produce without having to learn a lot of coding or dealing with a middleman.

Although he hasn’t released the code for MyMedia under a formalized open source license, Goodrow says he’s glad to share the system with anyone at another school or university. "Pretty much anyone with an .edu email address" can have it, he says.

As for the future, Goodrow plans to make these three different content management solutions appear more seamless to his campus users. Because each system is well-tuned to its specific needs, he doesn’t envision them needing to be combined into a central system or database. Nevertheless, he doesn’t see a reason why the differences between them can’t be made invisible to students, faculty, and the general public. Each user should be able to see the media she has a need and right to see, whether that’s course content reserved for enrolled undergraduates or an archival program on deaf culture intended for public viewing.

For higher education (just like the consumer and enterprise verticals before), managing digital media content is no longer extra credit—it’s a requirement. These three universities show that solutions are out there, whether they’re open source, fully featured commercial systems, or new platforms designed specifically for education.

I think it’s safe to predict that content and asset management in education is an area we’re going to see heat up in the next year. Now is the time to start investigating and planning for your college or university’s future video library.