Steeple Project

Steeple is a JISC funded UK Higher Education community project, led by Oxford University, the Open University, and Cambridge University. We are hoping that many other UK Higher Education Institution with join in with the project.

The vision for the Steeple project is to create a viable community around '''scalable, enterprise-level solutions suitable for the UK-HE sector''' in the areas of automated '''video/audio capture, video/audio processing, and video/audio delivery ("podcasting")'''.

Educational video and audio is undergoing a step change, posing new requirements on institutional workflows that have high overlap between institutions. Particularly the availability of affordable recording techniques as well as new distribution channels has changed the way in which audio and video visual material is used in UK higher education. The Steeple project will look at the processes supporting effective use of audio and video (“podcasts”) using emergent technologies that can streamline complex audio-visual encoding activities through enterprise level services. This centralised institutional work will relieve the burden placed on departmental support structures and lead to long term savings from the reduced time and effort in creating audio visual materials for teaching, research and outreach. The project outputs will support the JISC community by providing a clearly documented example of processes necessary to implement an enterprise level podcasting encoding solution, that will have been tested for robustness and interoperability within each of the three different collaborating universities.

A core aspiration of the project is to conserve resources by not duplicating effort. This is relevant on at least three levels:

•  '''Within an institution.''' If an institution does significant podcasting, the best practices and workflows developed through the Steeple project will significantly reduce institutional overheads to podcasting. 
• '''Nationally:''' At the moment, each institution has to make their own technical developments. Steeple seeks to build a UK community to share tools, and to develop these jointly where they are needed. 
• '''Internationally:''' Just as the National requirements, there are international requirements, where Steeple needs to coordinate in order to reduce effort in the UK-HE sector. Steeple works closely with the OpenCast, to make sure that OpenCast and Steeple work in a joined up way, avoiding the duplication of effort, and making sure that best practices feed into, and are obtained from, OpenCast.

According to those visions, the project will seek to communicate the project as best as possible, and build a strong community, both within institutions, on a national level, and on an international level.

(We use the term podcasting both in the strict sense as rss-syndicated downloads, as well as in the much broader sense of encompassing any form of video/audio capture, video/audio processing, and video/audio delivery. This encompasses both manual and automated creation, downloading and streaming, authenticated and unauthenticated access, local delivery and delivery via channels such as academic or commercial, including iTunesU and YouTube).

The project will run from October 2008 to March 2010. We are hoping to work with all UK-HEIs that have an interest in OpenCast, and hope that Steeple will lead to strong participation of UK-HEI in OpenCast.

The Steeple web site is http://www.steeple.org.uk . To find out more, please contact Peter Robinson (at Oxford University),  Bjoern Hassler (at Cambridge University), or Ben Hawkridge (at the Open University).