Streaming Video Goes to College
Riismandel says his students don’t want to deal with codecs or players. They just want it to work without too much effort. "They want an embedded player where they don’t have [to] think too hard about the player or plug-in or codec. We have a fair number of Mac users, and Windows Media becomes a problem. You have to use the WMV plug-in for QuickTime, and that becomes a stopper for many users. Vice-versa, Windows users don’t have QuickTime installed." To resolve this, Riismandel says he may encode the video in a variety of formats.
He says that he doesn’t get a lot of direct feedback from students, but when he does, it is often complaints about the university’s approach to video delivery, which is generally out of his control. "The complaints we hear more often have to do with access. For instance, some of our content is streamed only due to copyright reasons or instructor desire. They don’t want people downloading. So inevitably we’ll get complaint emails from students in these courses saying, ‘I hate using Real Player or I hate using Windows Media Player. Why can’t I just download it?’ We have to explain the department chose not to take that option. This was a choice. This [is] not just something we are too stupid to do."
Students also complain at the end of the semester or exam time when there is a heavy drain on bandwidth as every student is trying to access the video at the same time. Riismandel says this is due more to broadband issues—everyone in an apartment building trying to view video the night before an exam—than anything he can control on his end.
Do They Have Faculty Buy-In?
Just because you offer video doesn’t mean professors are ready or willing to use video either as part of the curriculum or as a supplement. As you would expect, there are various levels of buy-in, which tend to break along generational lines with younger professors more willing to use video than their older counterparts.
Morris reports that about 150–200 out of 700 full-time professors make use of Drexel’s services. This accounted for about 2,500 VOD or podcasts last year. Drexel is known for its online courses, but Morris says it’s still a struggle to educate faculty about the benefits of using streaming video.
"We tend to approach things in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary[,] way. ‘If you build it, they will come’ is not true. The cutting-edge people will come because they will come to anything, but the people who are technophobic or are just not interested, they won’t come," Morris says.
He says the way to get professors on board is for students to pressure them, and his staff tries to deliver based on those preferences. "What we have tended to do is let students do the job in pushing the faculty in their directions because the faculty are trying to adhere [to] what students are looking for in content, richness and engagement and interactivity," he says.
Klenja agrees that it’s the students who drive the use of streaming video on campus, but he says a lot of it also has to do with the age of the faculty. "The whole online thing is student-driven, it’s not faculty-driven. We still have a significant number of faculty who aren’t doing the online thing, no matter what, no matter how, but we have a significant number of new faculty we are hiring every year who want to do video and occasionally we get more requests than we can handle in a reasonable amount of time," he says. In fact, the college is building a $12 million Instructional Technology Center, and the ground has already been broken, Klenja reports.
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