Heading down to UC Santa Cruz on Monday (my alma mater) to check out their homegrown webcast capture/delivery system developed by Sheryl Martin-Schultz. They announced it at during June’s iTunes U pow-wow at Apple (it primarily uses Apple products) and they’re gathering a large group of NorCal schools for the show-n-tell. Henry Burnett, Director of Media Services at UCSC, tells me that more than anything it’s a great chance to start building a community around the technology. Absolutely. There’s a groundswell of schools putting their lectures online. We’ve turned some corner in the past year, the past 6 months even. Chalk it up the explosion of video on the Web. And of course podcasting, now leading into major vlogging. But I credit iTunes U for kicking things into high gear for higher-ed.
UCSC will host folks from Foothill-deAnza, West Valley, SJ State, Berkeley, Irvine, Davis, Riverside, San Diego, and Stanford. Get down! That’s a lot of schools in just this area, and the story’s the same across the country. Stanford will be joining us at Berkeley the following day to check out webcast.berkeley’s automated system — now 5 years old, 10 if you include research. Folks from Taiwan’s NCCU WebTV group are coming for the same on Wednesday, and a few folks from Australia’s Lectopia are coming by on Friday. Hot hot hot!
There’s potential here for sharing a community-built system, low-cost, using open source tools. UCSC is on Apple hardware, with MySQL db, automater scripts, and Broadcaster/Darwin. We’re on Linux/MySQL/PHP, using RealServer for video though moving to MPG-4 for downloads.
There’s also potential to whip up more support for open content. Had a great talk with UCLA who’s BruinCasts are going gangbusters since we first chatted about it over a year ago. I told them it would change everything. Many of their profs choose the open route. I expect a slew of open access lectures as iTunes U sites launch this Fall.
Good times. Look for reports from UCSC soon.
