COMPUTING SEMINAR

ABSTRACT

We have developed several lecture capture tools which easily allow educational material to be captured and delivered over the web. These tools include the Sync-O-Matic-3000 used to produce the CERN web-lecture archive and our newest tool, the ClipBoard-2000 which is designed to be used with very little training or infrastructure. As the capture tools evolve in their usability, new challenges arise. The media produced by today's capture tools needs to be reusable over a wide range of delivery mechanisms and connection capabilities. In the short-run, we just generate a number of differrent versions of each lecture, or place several copies of each lecture on several servers. Ultimately this must be automated with the data being served from a network of repositories, allowing the user to view the material using whatever tools they have at hand. This means a multi-technology capability for a lecture. Ultimately users should be able to get media on any operating system (PC, Mac, JUNIX) and using any media technology (Real, Microsoft, Quicktime, MPEG) and at any performance level from a 386PC up to a high-end UNIX system. It is not possible to pre-build the hundreds or even thousands of different versions required to satisfy the variety of user requirements for viewing. This leads us to the need for dynamically generated content from the server at the moment that each user demands the information. CERN and the University of Michigan have already collaborated on demonstrating the value of capturing and storing web-based content using the Sync-O-Matic-3000. CERN and the University of Michigan are starting to work on this repository problem together. The presentation will discuss both the current state of the art in lecture capture and the planned efforts in the lecture repository area. One interesting thread is to start work with the W3C to develop a standard for lecture interchange between repositories.

References:

Author page: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/
Lecture Archive: http://webcast.cern.ch/Projects/WebLectureArchive/