Open U

Abstract:

The goal of the Open U project is to work with the Opencast community and the larger open education movement to identify needs and build a global community around open technology choices for video distribution. PCF’s team will work with Universities to adhere to Open Education community-defined standards for video publishing and distribution with the goal of creating the largest Open Education video directory in history.

Open U Project Overview:

Many universities have gravitated toward offering full video of their courses to a global online audience. With production and distribution costs falling, more and more schools will join this open-access educational movement. While it generally began as a movement to further the spread of global knowledge, many universities are finding surprising benefits for all parties involved. For example, openly accessible course videos help draw attention to a professor's work, they can keep alumni engaged and informed, and students often supplement their studies with the material. With so much energy and promise behind it, the open-access educational movement needs distribution tools that match its unique needs; an opportunity exists to build a video publishing and distribution system that helps educators maximize their potential to share and build on knowledge.

Universities currently publishing video generally rely on commercial and/or proprietary systems for distribution. Not only are they costly to install, operate, and maintain, but they can also limit the reach, effectiveness, and ubiquity of the educational material being published. Ideally, schools would have easy access to free and open source publishing tools, and be able to offer their video content with the benefits of systematic openness. Some of these benefits include educational content being: sharable between individuals and institutions, easily discoverable and accessible on the web and other platforms, compatible with a variety of mobile and video hardware, not reliant on singular commercial interests, and so on.

A set of tools can help opencast fulfill its vision of a broad-based, open media ecosystem. The Opencast Matterhorn project promises to open up the capture and processing of educational video; however, free and open source solutions are still needed for publishing, aggregating, and consuming the educational content. We're approaching a critical juncture, as more and more educators begin producing video content; not only will educators require simple and effective tools for publishing, but they will need technical/metadata standards that have been agreed upon collectively. Additionally, publishing educational content in a free, open, and globally accessible fashion should be presented as a social norm in the field.

The Participatory Culture Foundation is ready to drive forward a broad consensus for open technical standards, close the gap in the open educational content publishing/consumption toolset, draw attention to an aggregator of freely accessible and high-quality educational media, and promote globally responsible social norms in the educational media publishing movement.

Our Organization

The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering a common platform for connecting people and social media around the world. PCF was founded in 2005 as an open media advocacy organization, building media tools and campaigns in the public interest. PCF makes bottom-up economies and cultures possible by ensuring that our political, social and cultural systems are open and democratic everywhere.  We work to eliminate gatekeepers and empower communities around the world.

PCF has experience building consumer grade software for open video and audio distribution with our flagship application, Miro (ww.getmiro.com — an open video aggregator and platform), and can build additional tools and infrastructure, as well as define social norms and standards around open education publishing, appropriate to the open-access educational community.

Miro is licensed open source (GNU),  so any institution can add pedagogically relevant tools to Miro rather than rely on a corporation's road map. PCF has a pre-existing and global audience of hundreds of thousands of viewers through the Miro video platform. PCF can leverage this audience to drive adoption of a set of standards for publishing video in a fully accessible way, as well as provide an easily accessible point of aggregation, where the public can find high quality open education content.

There are various open educational initiatives around the world -- PCF is dedicated to working and interfacing with the entire community of those interested in bringing vital educational materials to learners around the world. The Opencast community brings together education advocates who help promote openness and accessibility in university environments. PCF will work with the Opencast community to define and address the needs of an open education environment where students and professors can thrive.


Needs Addressed

Poor Learning Environments: Some institutions are publishing to YouTube, which promises broad distribution; however, the YouTube environment is not geared towards learning. Barriers include numerous distractions (i.e. related videos and comments), difficulty with archiving videos (students can't easily reference materials), and a non-linear playback system that can be less efficient and disruptive. Overall, it’s a highly commercial space that won't necessarily develop features conducive to online learning. An Open U alternative to YouTube creates an open learning environment where students can find, share, watch, and archive videos at their own pace and leisure — Open U allows students to customize their own experience of open educational video content to fit their learning needs.

Highly Proprietary Distribution Channels: A broad variety of educational material is dependent on the iTunes store (in iTunes U), because it alone offers a downloadable library section dedicated to educational content. Although iTunes brings with it a large audience, there are many barriers to access and discovery for the greater community of learners around the world, especially those in developing countries with limited access to the expensive and/or proprietary Apple hardware and software. Students who might benefit from having mobile educational content are out of luck if they don't own an iPod. More open publishing methods would allow content to flow into iTunes, as well as many additional platforms.

Fragmented Distribution: The open education movement needs an easy-to-use, easily accessible destination website —an aggregator— focusing on high-quality, trustworthy, university-produced media. This site could reach a large international community, and could bring together decentralized islands of content without the need to centrally host the media. PCF, via Miro, has a global, pre-built, and rapidly expanding audience of hundreds of thousands of viewers, which can be used to seed an aggregator website and community.

Optimized Experience for Video: Because video is experienced so differently than text and audio, non-web platforms often add value to the browsing and viewing experience.For instance, the Miro video player offers many advantages over its web counterparts; for example, Miro downloads and stores each video, in its entirety, so it's suitable for low bandwidth situations where streaming would be impossible. Another advantage is Miro's automated subscription system, which makes following a weekly course (or full schedule of courses) nearly effortless. While the web has proven king for short form content, Miro is very well suited for long-form, high-resolution, full-screen video viewing. The application currently allows simple placemarking (ie. watch where you left off), video archiving, and playlist creation, but could also be easily extended to accommodate more complicated annotation and reference functions.

Advantages of Open Publishing: Many leading universities publish in a fashion that doesn't allow media to be easily accessible on a variety of platforms. Video feeds available through Miro are published using open standards, so all content can live outside the Miro universe; for instance if a viewer prefers the web or a competing video aggregator (eg. iTunes), they can get it there. If a viewer requires closed captioning, translations, or other viewing aids, open content is far easier to adapt to these specific needs. Content published in this open fashion can live and work in almost any environment.


Open U Project Roadmap:

Phase 1: Requirements (3 months)
Continue to explore needs, goals, and requirements of the Opencast community.
    a. Determine common publishing methods and existing workflows.
    b. Consider metadata schemas used by Opencast members. Co-develop and promote a unified standard.
    c. Refine this document based on feedback from Opencast community.

Phase 2: Toolbuilding (6 months)
Building out the tools and infrastructure from the requirements phase.
    a. An Open U website, which aggregates and promotes premium educational content in an easy to browse/watch fashion.
    b. Publishing to Open U is compatible and easily integrated with Matterhorn and other common workflows.
    c. Metadata standards for educational publishing are promoted internally (via publishing to Open U) and externally (via the Opencast community).
    d. A custom version of Miro is developed, specifically for Open U.

Phase 3: Publicity and Growth (2 months concentrated, plus ongoing)
Heavily promote the content, website, and participating universities.
    a. Press and outreach work is done by PCF, in coordination with leading universities that publish on Open U.
    b. The Open U site is promoted heavily to PCF's global audience via Miro.
    c. New universities are courted and added to Open U on an ongoing basis.

Phase 4: Future
Potential and future additions to the Open U offering.
    a. Decentralized hosting and publishing platform, compatibe with Matterhorn and Open U.
    b. Miro to sync with portable and mobile devices (including: apple products, the android platform, general purpose hand-held media players, etc)
    c. Develop open systems for video referencing, marking-up, and annotation sharing that are compatible with Open U.

Roadmap Expanded:

Phase 1: Requirements

Work with opencast community on understanding what current needs are for public interfaces, tools and guides for the entire capture to publishing process to devise a community-wide plan on development of these tools in the next 6 months. The result of these talks will be a development roadmap with tasks taken on by PCF which are most suitable to our expertise and current need.

Likewise, PCF will help define/arrive at a widely acceptable metadata standard (likely based on Atom or RSS) for publishing educational content online. We will pusue this standard through a deliberate and ongoing conversation with the opencast community, at large.

Phase 2: Toolbuilding

Build a centralized/accessible open educational library (audio/video), a partnership with opencast,  and co-define standards for metadata and media feeds for opencast. This centralized library is a public web portal for presenting the aggregation of syndicated audio and video feeds from higher-ed institutions. Media will be accessible on the web, Miro, iTunes, YouTube, and other aggregators of the school’s choice. Publishing to the library can work in tandem with all existing workflows of Opencast.  The library can act a bridge to openness that is compatible with current approaches; it will be well organized and easily searchable and browseable.

PCF will build a University edition of the popular desktop application, Miro. This version of the player will immediately open to the educational video library, making it easy to find high quality educational content. Users can download single videos or subscribe to university channels and have all and new videos download automatically.

Phase 3: Publicity and Growth

Outreach to greater global and university communities, working with current access and distribution points for educational videos, such as VideoLectures.net, GetMiro.com, the opencast community at large, etc. PCF will present details on the Open U ecosystem, including publishing instructions for Open U, on all their major web properties.

Phase 4: Future

Decentralized software for decentralized audio/video libraries (single that feed into central repository (for universities and departments that prefer having even more control over their material and how it's presented). Schools will be able to download a web front-end to install on their own servers to present a browsable educational video library website of only their videos.

Execute on aforementioned publishing tool development roadmap as agreed upon by the opencast community. (From our research, it seems we may be helpful in making a publishing interface for some parts of the publishing process.)

Miro will sync up with portable devices such as mobile phones so that students can bring online courses with them or download them when on the go.