Case Study: Streaming Medical Education to the Mideast

The Qatar program supplements these canned lectures with end-of-week live review sessions, during which Qatar students can ask questions of their U.S. professors. These live sessions are accomplished using the school's Polycom video conferencing equipment.

But the Envivio Mindshare solution has become the workhorse driving this distance learning initiative. Erde is currently using the equipment to capture 15 hours of medical instruction per week (3 hours per day) and says he will soon double that amount.

Erde likes Mindshare’s ability to deliver high resolution and says that it is actually capable of delivering better resolution that the school's Polycom video conferencing equipment. He says the system's ability to deliver 640x480, as well as up to 1600x1200 VGA, "hits the sweet spot" of Cornell's needs.

Erde also likes the way the solution "provides two separate MPEG-4 video streams wrapped in a container." This allows the user to capture two streams at two different bandwidths. For example, the less important talking-head video of the presenter can be captured at a lower bandwidth, thus allowing you to save your bandwidth for the other more crucial video stream, which might be an image of a CAT scan, for example. Erde says he routinely uses two encoders in his classrooms, so he can capture at two different bandwidths.

Erde says that with Envivio Mindshare, you can even create a third window that plays back video after a 30-second delay, similar to a TV sports-style instant replay, as a picture within a picture.

But Erde says best thing about Envivio Mindshare is that way it has streamlined his workload. "With Envivio, the video is out the door with no work," says Erde. In contrast, the school's previous Webcasting solution (a cobbled-together "Rube Goldberg system," according to Erde) required 2-3 hours of postproduction for each hour captured. That was intolerable, according to Erde, who says that, "Without Envivio's labor-saving realtime encoding, this whole project would not be cost effective."

The only downside to the system that Erde can think of is that during PowerPoint presentations, the laser pointer doesn't show up, so "We have to train our medical faculty presenters how to use a mouse."

One obvious question that crops up regarding this project is why MPEG-4? Why not Microsoft Media or Real Networks?

"I have a normal bias toward open standards and an inborn phobia of Microsoft," says Erde.

MPEG-4 suits Cornell well because the medical school uses a lot of Apple workstations. "We needed an architecture that was flexible, standards-based, and supported the wide range of desktop and server platforms that we use at Cornell," says Erde. But he says that even if the school wasn’t heavy on the Macs, he'd still be using MPEG-4, simply because it is an open standard. He says that, three to five years from now, he doesn't want to have a huge archive of video content and have to struggle to find a proprietary player that can play it.

Erde also is enamored of MPEG-4's flexibility. "Its different profiles enable new capabilities, it provides good resolution, and it scales up well," he says. "It is the right technology," he concludes.

Half a world away from Erde's New York office, Qatar students will continue to benefit from Erde's use of the "right technology" over the next three years. The first class of students at the Weill Cornell Medical College-Qatar branch are currently in year three of the six-year medical degree program. The school will graduate its first streaming video-trained doctors in 2008.