Planet Opencast

There is a new videos section on the university website bringing together recent video initiatives: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/News/Videos/index.aspx

Take a look at this new video project, "Words of the World", http://www.wordsoftheworld.co.uk from Brady Haran, who created the Periodic Table of Videos, Sixty Symbols,and Bibledex

One year ago, the UC Berkley, ETH Zürich, University of Osnabrück and many many more university started the Opencast Matterhorn project to develop an enterprise level open source lecture recording system. I’m quality assurance lead in this project and my job is it, to develop processes and documents that ensures the quality of our software and of course testing, testing and some times of course testing .

With hours to go to RC6 and days to 1.0, I'm certainly premature to draw conclusions on the first year of the Matterhorn Project, even more so as there is another year to come. But how about the project and, more so, the product? How much can we live up to the expectations, our own as well as those in the community? Let's look back at what we wanted to achieve: To provide an out-of-the-box system to satisfy "The Cobbler" - someone remembers these orgzonas?

When I overheard someone say that Matterhorn was a community source project at the DIVESE2010 conference in Portland, Maine, I had to think of an article I read a couple of weeks ago from OSS Watch about these two models.

Just posted a couple of presentations I helped give over the last two months (here and here).  While both mention opencast, the Matterhorn project is still just in its infancy, and I focus more on results we have measured using our home brew Recollect product.

The University of Nottingham launched on iTunes U on Tuesday 15th June 2010. More information may be found at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/itunesu/

Yes, I'm back! We are back, actually. It seems like an eternity 0.5 being released and the friendly reactions from the community soon made way for some disappointment for its limited ability to convey a convincing impression of what Matterhorn would become. But that's the problem with releasing early (and often) - we at the same time were able to provide some insight to those looking under the hood which was good for the further development.

Das erste Release der Open Source Vorlesungsaufzeichnungssoftware Matterhorn ist nun veröffentlicht. Bis kurz vor dem Relase wurde hart an den Bugfixes für dieses Release gearbeitet und es wurde viel getestet um eine stabile erste Version verfügbar zu machen. Damit Interessierte die Software besonders einfach ausprobieren können, wird Version 0.5 als fertige virtuelle Maschine zum Download bereit gestellt.

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.