Matterhorn Overview

Matterhorn is...

Matterhorn is an end-to-end, open source platform that supports the scheduling, capture, managing, encoding and delivery of educational audio and video content. The features planned for the first release, scheduled for August 2010, include:

• Administrative tools for scheduling automated recordings, manually uploading files, managing metadata
• Recommended capture agent hardware specifications
• Integration with recording devices in the classroom for managing automated capture
• Distribution to channels such as YouTube, iTunes, and supporting services to push content to campus course or content management system
• Rich media user interface for learners to engage with content, including playback, content-based search, and captioning
• Processing and encoding services that prepare and package the media files for distribution

Matterhorn is also a media services framework. It will be flexible and services-based, so that organizations can choose to implement only the components they need, or replace default service implementations with their own to meet specific institutional needs.

Value to institutions

For institutions who want to easily produce audio and video webcasts and podcasts, Matterhorn will significantly lower the technical and cost barriers to entry. The Matterhorn 1.0 release will be an easy-to-install, out-of-the-box system with automated workflows.

For institutions who want to expand and evolve their existing commercial or homegrown systems, Matterhorn's service-based architecture allows insitutions to implement only the components they need, or replace default service implementations with their own to meet specific institutional needs. Read more about how Matterhorn fits into your organization's needs and goals.

Matterhorn is backed by a large community comprised of world-class experts in many domains relevant to audio and video technology and academic content production and delivery. Through community engagement, Matterhorn will continue to evolve in response to advances in technologies, emerging needs of end users, and lessons learned by all along the way.

Roadmap

After a year-long planning and community-building effort, development officially kicked off in July 2009. A preview release is available with basic functionalities to ingest, process, and deliver media.  The full release of Matterhorn 1.0 is scheduled for  August 2010.

The Challenges We Face

The Matterhorn project was inspired by a common set of challenges that we face as a community, including:

• High costs and constraints of vendor solutions
• Proprietary code lock-in (closed source)
• Patchwork quilt of technologies and research projects -- great systems that can't play together well
• Limited enterprise integraton with SIS or CLE/LMS
• Rich media accessibility (and associated benefits)
• Lack of learning tools
• Media preservation
• Rapidly changing technology

Guiding Principles

1. Lower Costs

Matterhorn aims to make lecture capture affordable for institutions just starting an academic podcasting program, as well as integrate with existing infrastructure for those institution who have already invested in a program. With features like easy to manage instructor participation and capture scheduling, automated workflows for processes such as encoding, captioning and indexing, and the ability to integrate wtih enterprise systems, Matterhorn 1.0 will provide an video management system that simply accomplishes all relevant functionality related to the production, the management and the distribution of lecture recording.

2. Scale up

The majority of institutions we talked to have a productive podcasting program already - but are less efficient than they would like it to be, and poorly situated to scale in response to the growing demand for lecture recordings and handling of media objects for the future. Instead of working with a variety of tools and programs to produce and distribute content, Matterhorn will offer all relevant functionalities as a integrated whole. This reduces the amount of manual work needed to shepherd media objects across various sub-systems, thus increasing productivity and reliability.

3. Increase Impact

Matterhorn will provide the community with a rich media platform for educational research, both technological and pedagogical. Upon this platform, a richer, more engaging student experience is within reach. More students can be reach in more ways, through strategies such as plugging into the right learning context (e.g. LMS), increasing interaction with the media, supporting learning strategies, and enabling universal access and improved discoverability.