Stanford Online Educates Silicon Valley
Just down the road from Berkeley, the Stanford Online program is goingstrong, with just the sort of corporate orientation one would expect, givenStanford's locale in the heart of Silicon Valley. In this hotbed oftechnological innovation, Stanford has put its Professional Educationprogram online to allow busy high-tech workers to take courses withoutleaving their computers.
Mike Rouan, director of Stanford Online/Broadcast Operations, explains thatthe operation is an outgrowth of a program dating back 32 years tovideo-based roots. Ten years ago, Rouan was involved in the originalInternet educational program out of which Stanford Online grew. Rouanremembers how, in the "primitive" era of the mid-1990s, viewers wererequired to download 25MB chunks of data, in QuickTime format.
"At the time, it was incredible. People were saying, ‘this is crazy, thisclass happened today at Stanford, and I'm able to watch it today,'" herecalls.
Innovation at Stanford does not go unnoticed by the industry at large. Whenthen-professor (and now Microsoft employee) Anoop Gupta devised anend-to-end streaming solution, Vextreme, it was eagerly snatched up byMicrosoft in 1997 and incorporated into an early version of what came to beknown as Windows Media. "A lot of things here start out as remote intereststhat explode, and that was one of them," Rouan says.
"[Gupta] saw this as a research problem. He thought, if you guys want to dothis, it's not very efficient, and this whole download thing is not good.Your frame rate is poor. Even today, I can honestly say, in terms of a realbumper-to-bumper solution, VExtreme was better than anything out there,"Rouan continues.
Today, producing the material is a fairly utilitarian process. They capturethe live event, index the video and have it up on the Web in close to anhour after the event finishes. Silicon Valley workers are the primary targetfor this extended education program and therefore the majority of theclasses offered are computer or engineering related. While some classes arestill offered in classrooms on campus, every class for the ProfessionalEducation program goes online, where anyone in the industry can takeadvantage of it.
"In the olden days, six years ago, we would have had to literally be in acertain room at a certain time. And those rooms are slowly beingre-purposed, because more and more people are watching it online," heexplains.
Not Everyone's a Cheerleader
The advancements are impressive. But in the academic world, thepro-streaming hysteria is mixed with calls for prudence, especially amongobservers and faculty members who see the growth of streaming classes as athreat to their control of educational materials and copyrights.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor in the Department of Culture andCommunication at New York University and an author whose research intocopyright issues led him naturally to the domain of intellectual propertyrights on the Internet, is among those pleading for caution. Admittedly both"bullish and bearish" about the Internet and its relationship to academia,Vaidhyanathan is concerned about maintaining reasonable control. "I thinkIt's important that universities especially, step back and think of whattheir real role and scope is in our information ecosystem," he says. "We arenot just high-priced publishers. We provide a service more than we provide aproduct. I think we're flattening out our model of ourselves when we focuson the delivery of product rather than the performance of service."
Vaidhyanathan warns against being too gung-ho about the new environment thatthe Internet — and streaming in particular — creates, and hopes that as thehype settles and the flow of money toward the Internet slows, people willtake some time to take a hard look at what distance learning does toeducation. "Maybe it's a good time to step back and take a breath," hecautions.
Such trepidation is not uncommon. Based on Rowe's experience, some degree ofevangelism is required to allay suspicions of faculty who might be reluctantto put their work on the Internet. For BIBS, the idea of wide-openavailability on the Internet was a priority. As Rowe explains, "one of thethings I pushed very hard for from the beginning was to publish this foreverybody in the world to access."
That made convincing some faculty to get involved all the more difficult."With many of them, typically, I get a couple of different responses. One,they're concerned about the quality and accessibility, and they're concernedabout the intellectual property. Some don¹t want me to publish themworldwide," says Rowe.
In response to their fears, Rowe is trying to put in place technology thatwould provide finer-grain control over distribution and access. He wouldlike to offer three levels of service: worldwide; local (for the Berkeleycommunity, including students, faculty and staff); and for enrolled studentsonly.
"In order to do that, we need to have authenticated servers, which thecampus is putting in," says Rowe. "It's possible to put in plug-ins for theRealPlayer to actually do that."
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