Harvard FAS Video Initiative Strong existing tradition and infrastructure for videotaping courses. Successful experiments 1998—1999 with 6 courses placing video of all or some lectures onto course Web pages. Funding through the existing Intel grant. –Purchase of servers, disk space and video conversion systems. –Addition of Osprey cards and software using other budgets.
Scope of the project Fall term 1999: 19 courses with all lectures videoed and put on-line. Approximately 50 hours per week. Transmission at 220 kbps. Restricted to the harvard.edu ip space only.
Details Video streaming servers in the FAS machine room. Approx. 100 GByte of storage. (Real server/Real video; one hour lecture = 100 mByte) Local video conversion/capture systems in four locations. –Videotaping done by our two FAS Audio-visual services. –Direct digital recording as well as conversion from analog. New classrooms and classroom upgrades in process to deal with needs for videotaping. (lighting, sound, etc.) Assisted and self-service conversion stations. –Automatic posting; no post production time for self-service users. –Assisted service currently comes with up to a 48 hour delay because of shortage of staff time. Will reduce to a few hours with addition of new student staff. Open details—long term storage, indexing, ownership of some video.
Usage Video made available to students in course via password. Three modes: –Lecture posted and left up all term –Lecture posted and left up for a limited time –Lectures posted only before the midterm and final. Supplemental video material also posted—lab instructions, resource material, movies, etc. Previous online video of course lectures did not result in reduced course attendance.
Other Harvard Initiatives Harvard Extension School has several courses in the CS program taught either completely with video or with videotape supplements. –These videos are indexed to the lecture notes. –4 hours per hour post production processing. Interactive video experiment with CMU. Business school video for case studies.