Case Study: Streaming Medical Education to the Mideast

Underlying Cornell's distance learning project is MPEG-4 streaming technology from Envivio—specifically, the company's Mindshare Presentation system.

Unlike Webcasting solutions that are based on many different technologies (HTML, Java, etc.), Mindshare takes advantage of a MPEG-4 BIF (BInary Format for Scenes) engine to deliver all the elements of the presentation (video, audio, still images, text, screen captures, etc.) as part of the same multi-track MPEG-4 stream. Thus Mindshare overcomes the usual limitations of synchronization, scalability, latency, and reliability that typically plague hybrid Webcasting systems.

Located in each Cornell classroom or lecture facility, Mindshare Composer can capture and record two video streams simultaneously. The first stream is usually video of the teacher/presenter. The second video stream is captured from the teacher's computer, a document camera, whiteboard, endoscope, microscope, or any display device with a VGA output. All the media objects are synchronized and packed into a single, standards-based MPEG-4 file.

Mindshare captures the VGA signal at native resolutions up to 1600x1200. In medical applications, high resolution is needed to faithfully render the detailed images from X-rays, MRIs, endoscopes, etc. In the medical field, missing a detail can result in the death of a patient, so every effort is made to display visual information in as high a resolution as possible.

When Cornell University launched its Qatar medical school branch, its first inclination, naturally, was to try to accomplish its distance education goals through the use of the more traditional technology of video conferencing. Such a solution would have the advantage of real-time student-teacher interaction, and the teaching process could mimic the familiar classroom style.

For a number of reasons, however, Cornell decided to implement a non-realtime streaming solution. Classroom lectures are captured and encoded in the medical school's classroom/lecture hall facilities in New York City and stored. These "canned" linear programs are then played back to Qatar students at scheduled times during the school week.

According to Dr. Steven Erde, senior director of the office of Academic Computing and chief security officer at WCMC, the main reason for going with a non-realtime solution was the 8-hour time difference between the U.S. and Qatar campuses. Cornell didn't want to force Qatar students come to classes in the middle of the night or other odd hours. Not only is there a time zone difference, but there's also a weekend difference, says Erde. In Qatar, the workweek runs from Sunday to Thursday, with the weekend consisting of Friday and Saturday.