Planet Opencast

Open Academic Video & Open Access

Olaf A. Schulte for the Opencast Community - Fri, Jan 22, 2010 5:21am GMT

While the colleagues are working hard towards 0.5, I had the pleasure of hosting a workshop on Open Video at ETH Zurich. As part of the IARU (International Association of Research Universities) workshop on Open Access publishing in Zurich (21/22nd January 2010), Bjoern Hassler (Cambridge) and myself put together a workshop on Open Video. The reason for the workshop was to raise awareness for Open Video among IARU members, but also to raise awareness for Open Access at those  institutions dealing with Academic Video.

While Open Video does come under Open Access more generally, there are still some issues that pertain to Open Video, and in particular recordings of events, including academic lectures. Using technologies like the Opencast Matterhorn application, such recordings are now mass producible, and now is a good time to consider the opportunities and challenges in making such video open.

The overall IARU workshop was perhaps aimed at librarians, and we may ask how many of  the open objects currently stores in library repositories are video? At the moment, perhaps not that many. However, we’ll see substantial growth due to technology development, and we need to be ready for this change.

Moreover, many partners currently involved in the Opencast Community not only seek to produce more lecture recordings, but also seek to exchange these openly, in addition to using commercial channels (like iTunesU, YouTube Edu) to surface their video to large audiences.

Olaf A. Schulte from ETH Zurich opened the workshop with a talk on these issues, introducing the Opencast idea, the Opencast Community and the closely connected Matterhorn project at the same time.

Simon Schlauri (Creative Commons, Switzerland), then familiarized the audience with the main facts around CC; in detail, he also talked about
•    the necessity of legal clearance with regard to the lectures recorded (check for copyright violations),
•    resulting responsibilities on behalf of lecturers and institutions,
•    due diligence the institution has to exercise when it comes to the review of the material, and
•    “fair use”, a legal construct that might allow the use of copyrighted material - in a certain context though and dependent on the national jurisdiction's interpretation of "fair use".

The discussion hereafter very much raised the question what the actual risk of legal problems is with video and academic content in general. There was overwhelming consensus that the figures of actual lawsuits are insignificant to non-existent when compared to the number of objects being dealt with.

Bjoern Hassler (University of Cambridge) spoke about the "The Steeple/Opencast metadata project", emphasising the need for an agreed metadata standard as a pre-requisite for sharing materials. The Steeple project has taken a pragmatic approach, and is using a combination of RSS/Atom/Yahoo Media for bringing video materials into a shared structures (see e.g. http://www.opencontent.org.uk).

Peter Robinson (Oxford University). Oxford University was one of the first UK universities to join iTunesU. Surfacing Oxford video materials through iTunesU has been highly successful for Oxford, and made their video available to a broad audience. However, the vision at Oxford went further than this: Video should not just be publicly available, but it should be available as Open Video, for sharing and re-use. An important step in this was to talk to people individually, convincing them that making videos available under a CC license would be a good way forward.

Katsusuke Shigeta from the University of Tokyo then reported on activities in Tokyo to foster the creation of Opencourseware (OCW) and Open Video content and identified a number of similarities between these. Both are restricted in their role to disseminate knowledge by the resources it takes to clarify the legal status; also, the language barrier comes into this.

Mara Hancock (UC Berkeley) closed the workshop with a talk on Open Access and accessibility. How can we make video recordings more accessible? At present there are high cost implications e.g. for close captioning, so at Berkeley close captioning currently tends happens on demand. There are features built into Matterhorn now, that should help with accessibility. In the future, it is hoped that Matterhorn would support full speech-to-text, and that we can thereby find technical solutions to at least some accessibility issues.

Overall, the workshop showed that Open Academic Video has the potential to fully benefit from the Open Access paradigm. By comparison though, there are a number of differences to the "traditional" side of Open Access. In the library domain, reducing subscription fees is an important motivation for Open Access, whereas in the domain of multimedia financial issues seem to be less important, perhaps because there are neither journals nor publishers in the same sense. Also, the academic relevance of publishing in distinct journals is yet unknown to video. And it seems fair to say that Open Access - if you take a look at the Berlin Declaration (http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html) for example - is often more focused on research at the moment. There is thus a case for making an addendum to the Berlin declaration, that focuses more on education on the one hand, but also on new open objects, such as Open Academic Video.

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Categories: Planet Opencast

Ticketyboo - December's here!

Olaf A. Schulte for the Opencast Community - Tue, Dec 8, 2009 7:46am GMT

And the freeze. Actually that's not true as Zurich is still in the grey, cloudy, and rainy season that is going to last until March - and the Matterhorn project sees no freeze in activities either. Everyone and everything is geared towards the 0.5 release in January 2010 and the clash with reality. It's a litmus test for development activities of course, not only because everything has to be there on time, but also because of the feedback we will hopefully receive from people and institutions testing. Will they see something we have overlooked? Will they want something we didn't consider? Will they ask for something we cannot deliver? And is it going to work at all?

The test is not for developers and designers only, though. It's also a first indicator as to the extent to which we can consider ourselves to be fully embedded into an Opencast Community we consider our prime target group. Only if the members of that community approve of the first major step we make towards 1.0, we can become more (self-)assured that Matterhorn meets the needs of academic institutions.

PS: Ticketyboo

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Categories: Planet Opencast

Prague

Olaf A. Schulte for the Opencast Community - Thu, Nov 5, 2009 7:21am GMT

Terena is the European Federation of research and scientific networks (NREN), who - like SWITCH in Switzerland or SURFnet in the Netherlands offer services around the production, management and distribution of audio and video in an academic context. Within TERENA, a Task Force "TF Media" has now been established to foster the exchange of knowledge about these issues - so this should be related to the Opencast Community somehow, shouldn't it?

The fact that I'm blogging from the TF preparation meeting in Prague indicates that there is a small connection already. However, the talks I have with colleagues here and the impression I get from their presentations highlight the need for further networking: NREN and academic institutions (i.e. universities) are acting in the same sphere with changing roles and dependencies, but they haven't found a way yet to coordinate their various efforts. Both provide and use solutions for audio and video (let's start to call them video management systems), with some universities being customers to the NREN, some universities using proprietary systems and some universities collaborating to develop new solutions (yes, I'm talking about Opencast Matterhorn). Both produce, own or manage content, and the focus on lecture recording we typically see at universities is balanced by NREN managing large repositories with existing (broadcast) material. And they both share similar problems: Technical one (What formats to support?), legal ones (How can we publish content without checking for IPR issues?), organisational ones (Where do we get the names from all those presenters from?). And as they also share major goals like enabling the exchange of video content, they really should find a way to synchronize their efforts. I'll go back to the lobby now and do my bit.

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Categories: Planet Opencast