Schooled in Streaming

Allen adds that some student organizations have already expressed an interest in using the system for communications. The student government association has already begun working to post video of their meetings online. She envisions the system becoming much like a campus cable channel.

Marist College
Since its founding in 1929, Marist College’s location overlooking the Hudson River in midstate New York has been one of its greatest assets. But perhaps as important as Marist’s scenic surroundings has been its proximity to IBM’s main manufacturing plant in nearby Poughkeepsie.

The highlight of Marist’s 25-year relationship with IBM has been the Joint Study Project that began in 1988. The project has given IBM a test-bed for exploring concepts and applications that may be of future commercial value. It has given Marist a world-class technology platform, including a zSeries 900 mainframe and a comprehensive Ethernet-based campus-computing network. It has also given Marist students and faculty the opportunity to work with IBM computer scientists and engineers.

Marist College has a student body of about 6,000, a faculty of 590, and an operating budget of $110 million. The use of web-based video materials and streaming at Marist began on a pilot level about seven years ago and was initially driven by the IBM Joint Study Project, says Josh Baron, director of academic technology and elearning for the college. Five years ago, the college began to stream important college events like graduation and also launched a major digital language lab project that uses streaming audio files to support foreign language courses.

As Marist did more and more streaming, they started to realize the importance of managing streaming assets. "We knew bandwidth limitations were dropping significantly among our student population and, therefore, we would be able to use a lot of rich media in our courses." Such thoughts were in the minds of Baron and his staff as the decision was made to adopt the MediaPlatform from Interactive Video Technologies (IVT), which was introduced to them by IBM, which also has a partnership with IVT.

MediaPlatform is a publishing platform for creating, managing, distributing, and measuring live and on-demand presentations. It offers a menu of one-to-many capabilities, including synchronized video, audio, PowerPoint slides, and Flash animations, combined with interactive features such as online polling and Q&A that generate real-time feedback from audience participants. All capabilities are wizard-driven, and the system is hosted locally in Marist’s "open-source" environment, says Baron.

"A key factor for us in considering IVT is that it is much more than a ‘black box’ streaming solution. We didn’t want a system that you just drop into a classroom and record lectures with, as this was not going to give us powerful instructional content for the web," says Baron.

Roadblocks to Implementation
The implementation of a streaming media system is bound to face roadblocks, both technical and human. Many of the technical challenges that Marist College has faced have been the consequence of the school’s commitment to open-source computing. "One of our challenges was to work with our corporate partner, IVT, to implement their system within a 100% open-source environment (Linux, mySQL, and the Darwin streaming server)," Baron says. "We encountered technical challenges in this process, but saw it as an important learning experience."

When it came to choosing a format, the natural choice for the open-sourcers at Marist was, of course, H.264, which is supported there by the QuickTime 7 player. "This format provides us with very high-quality video with good compression rates," says Baron. "Our Media Center captures video in various formats but then transcodes it into MPEG-4 for streaming and archiving."

But Baron says that the biggest challenges were human, not technical. "We’re asking our instructors to change how they teach by giving them new teaching tools that could not have been imagined 10 years ago," he says. "Such a significant change is particularly difficult for such a personal thing as teaching."