Tag Archives: educational videos

A video is not a video

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Watching a sitcom on Hulu, a 3-D movie in a theater, a funny home video on youtube and a course video on coursera are all, technically, about consuming video content. And yet, we won’t say that they are the same thing.

“It can be used for other things as well, right?” We are often asked by well-wishers when we explain that our product helps educators capture, manage and deliver classroom videos. What does a video-product focused on education even mean?

As the example above shows, a video is a TV show, a movie, a beautiful slice of life, or a lecture. A video is not just a video. The experience and expectations from the products delivering these different kinds of video content are different.

Watching a TV show starts with the need for entertainment. You are getting bored, or you need a break, or you need your daily fix. A movie in a theater may be about getting bored, but it is highly likely that it is about an outing with family or friends, your appreciation for specific director or actor, or a love of the medium. Coursera video consumption starts at your need to learn more about something specific, proceeds with searching for relevant courses, best teachers, best platform for peer interaction and getting credits, then ends up on the lecture video.

Not only the consumption of different kinds of videos is different, the requirement of content creators are also different. They need different capabilities from the platform used for delivering these videos. And they need this delivery platform to fit with the rest of their operations.

That is why a video product for education. As a business we need a market large enough for being in the business to make sense. As product creators, we need a market narrow enough to be made happy with the capabilities of the product. And as a team, we need something we are passionate about. We think education fits the bill. That’s why CourseHub!

Let me explain with the examples of some of the decisions made in CourseHub keeping in mind the education market.

  • Video optimizations: One of the biggest reason an educational institute would want to use an online platform is to increase its reach, most likely to places where physical access to quality teachers is difficult. So, we can not make assumptions about what kind of Internet infrastructure will be available to the learners. At the same time, when a teacher is teaching in the class, blurring of the content on the board, or breaking of his voice won’t be acceptable. That’s why we spent a lot of efforts in making sure that HD-quality classroom videos can be delivered at speeds as low as 100Kbps with CourseHub. For many other applications, this may not be the target market, and hence such efforts may not make business sense. For us, it does!
  • Organization of videos: Do you want to have playlists, shows with episodes, or individual movies indexed by themselves? Lectures organized in courses makes sense for education. That is what we did!
  • Enabling Capture: A TV show or movie producer has setup to produce, edit and process high-quality videos. It is his job. A home video is fine in whatever quality the camcorder or digital camera captures it. A lecture video needs to be high-quality, but the job of a teacher or even the institute is not to produce videos. It is to teach. That’s why CourseHub includes not only delivery or management of lectures, but also the capture. Further teachers are at their best when they teach in their natural style. So, the capture has been designed to be automated and non-intrusive. It can capture lectures in a regular classroom. Teachers don’t need to sit in front of a webcam, they don’t even have to be aware of the camera. They can teach their class as usual.
  • Interactivity: Student-teacher interaction is important for learning. So, CourseHub enables that with no requirement of any special hardware or software at student’s end. It enables sychronous as well as asynchronous interaction.
  • Assessments: You wouldn’t usually be quizzed on a TV show at the end of a season, but it is an essential part of completing a course. So, CourseHub has gone beyond videos and created a full-fledged assessment system to help educators and learners have complete educational experience.

The list is practically endless and we are adding to it everyday. Do you have any thoughts on what a video platform of education should have? Let us know!

Self-paced Learning for IITK Students

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The world (or at least the Indians) would like to think that IITians are super-humans and can not possibly be bogged down by anything. But let’s accept it. It is already not easy being a student in India. The pressure to succeed and be on the top is just immense. And if you are a student at one of the top institutes, you are surrounded by and judged against extremely competent peers. It is no surprise that the pressure on such students just shoots up. A helping hand to cope with academic pressure won’t be a bad thing.

Among other things, the pace of teaching is rather fast at places like IITs. There is no time to warm up, to slow down and take a break, or to adjust the time spent on different topics. I still remember our first day of classes at IIT Kanpur. It was the very first lecture. Professor walked into the class. “Good Morning. Welcome to IIT Kanpur.” That was all the settling time you get. And off he goes teaching PHY101 (Introduction to Physics) with those wide-eyed, 17-year olds staring at him in disbelief and amazement. One complete topic was finished in the fifty-five minute lecture! The rest of the days were no different.

It is no wonder, then, that students of Computer Science and Engineering department at IIT Kanpur have taken to CourseHub deployed by Aurus Network in the department. The solution is being used for Lecture Capture. Students can view the recorded lectures any time. It helps them review the concepts taught in the class and helps them catch up with something they missed or found particularly difficult to grasp. It also lets them audit the courses they are interested, but not enrolled in.

Here are couple representative comments from the students

“Really HELPFUL. I could watch some very important lectures that i missed, it helped me to get those points which are somehow lost here/there in class and finally it helped me to recover in the class.” – Chirag Gupta, B.Tech Student

“CourseHub is really useful. In addition to viewing my regular classes, I am also able to audit other interesting courses, without being required to attend the actual classes. I am able to learn many new things due to this.” – Vipin, M.Tech Student

The most important advantage of Lecture Capturing is that it allows students to learn at their own pace without asking for any disruptions in the teaching methodology. In this TED Video, Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, talks about a very interesting observation from their data. There are topics on which a particular student gets stuck and takes a lot of time. In the traditional teaching environment that might just lead to the student be classified as the “slow kid”, if he gets stuck on something early on. But when self-paced learning is enabled, as it happens with Khan Academy’s recorded videos, once the student does get past that difficult topic, he might race ahead on other ones. One size doesn’t fit all. How do we custom-tailor education for everyone? Lecture Capture does provide a very potent tool!

Have you seen lecture capturing in use in any of the educational institutes you attended? What was your experience?

The Changing Face of Distance Education

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Distance education has been an answer to the educational aspirations and needs of people who can otherwise not access the education system because of its limited capacity, costs involved or because of their other commitments. Traditionally, distance education has been delivered through correspondence courses, where educational content is provided through periodically sent printed material, supplemented by occasional face-to-face instruction. As computers became more prevalent, many distance education providers supplemented or replaced their printed text content with electronic text or enhanced content. Distance education has definitely been effective. It has made education accessible and cost-effective. It has also made it possible to let the students learn at their own pace. Open schools and universities are cases in point.

Despite their large contribution to the cause of education, traditional distance education leaves much to be desired. For example certain subjects require extensive student-teacher interaction to be effectively taught. Many learners are also likely to find consumption of text material inadequate for proper learning.  There has been a general perception of distance education being inferior in quality and effectiveness to the traditional classroom education. Offering distance education has also been fraught with challenges. Whether it is generating the content, or reliable testing and assessment, the expertise and ability to do those have been limited.

However, the landscape is changing fast now. The change is aided by the vast improvements in communication infrastructure, especially wide availability and reducing cost of broadband Internet access. The technologies available for creation and delivery of content have enabled different sets of educators to offer distance education, and they are also letting learners in all corners of the world access it. In this article we are going to examine some of the pioneering work that is happening in the field.

What is Changing?

Content

Text is no longer the only type of content available to the distance learners. Nor are they limited only to passively created animations and other multimedia content. Increasingly it is possible for them to learn from a teacher actually in action. Offerings like MIT’s Opencourseware and Khan Academy have done pioneering efforts in this direction. NPTEL is working recreate the Opencourseware model the India, where they record actual lectures in higher education institutes and make them available for public viewing. Two of the most noted companies in recent times to have created impact with video content delivery have been Coursera and Udacity.

These capturing of videos is being done in two broad ways. In the first one a teacher uses a digital aid like a regular computer, tablet or smart board for writing. The video shows the digital aid, along with the synchronised audio of the teacher. Usually such videos are created specifically for the distance education programmes or platforms. Udacity, Khan Academy etc. use such videos in their offering.

The other way is where the videos are captured in a regular classroom, where the teacher teaches a group of students physically present there. The videos can optionally be edited to be used in distance education. Videos provided by Opencourseware, NPTEL etc. are mostly actual classroom videos.

Both these models have their pros and cons. For educators who already have existing classroom programmes, most universities for example, it makes sense to capture classroom videos and reuse it. On the other hand, for platforms and programmes starting from scratch, it might be worthwhile to create videos specifically for distance education. This way they can optimize the content for distance learners whose needs might be slightly different from the ones present in the classroom. The downside of this is that many good teachers may be more comfortable teaching in their natural style in a classroom than writing on a digital aid and talking to potentially zero audience.

Learners

Although the entire idea behind distance learning has always been to reach out to the remote learners, the Internet has reduced the physical barriers even further. Learning and teaching have broken the national barriers. US-based Coursera had only 38.5% enrolment from within US among its first one-million students. Udacity also has less than 50% enrolment from US. Online tutoring companies like TutorVista from India have 95% of their students in US.

Educators

Distance education has traditionally been offered by universities and schools operating on large-scale. Some of them offer only distance education courses, while others provide those courses in addition to the regular classroom courses. Now new technology and businesses are making it feasible and affordable for institutions of all sizes and resources to offer distance education. Some models have gone as far as empowering individuals to be able to do the same. TutorVista, Wiziq are some of the cases in point. Using these platforms individuals sitting at their home are successfully creating content and offering classes to a global audience. In our experience at Aurus Network, we found an unexpected set of clients in Test Preparation & Training domain. While a few big names operated correspondence courses in the past, many such institutes of all sizes have now adopted technology to deliver their classroom videos to a national audience. The idea has, thus, reached not only to the learners everywhere, but also to the educators. The force enabling this ever-increasing reach is technology, which makes it feasible and affordable to create and deliver content even at a small-scale.

Testing & Assessment

While distance education is a great way of scaling education, testing & assessment are its biggest challenge because of the need for proctoring. Traditionally educators have relied on physical proctoring, where the students would come to a centre to take tests. In-person invigilators would be appointed at these centres.

Technology is changing that aspect too. Now, it is possible for students to take their exams from their home using online proctoring. Online proctoring solutions use the webcam and microphone on student’s machine and potentially screen capturing solutions to ensure genuineness. They may also do identity-authentication to ensure that the enrolled candidate is taking the test. Online proctoring makes the testing & assessment as accessible and scalable as the education delivery.

Challenges

Perception of Inferiority

Distance education is often perceived as playing a second fiddle to the mainstream education. The learning is not supposed to be of the same level as a regular classroom. Several factors have contributed to this perception and we believe that many of them are being addressed with technological advances discussed above.

For example CourseHub allows for the classes to be captured and delivered live to the remote students with the facility of audio, video and text chat between the students and the teacher. This recreates the classroom environment, where student-teacher interaction plays a major role in learning. Discussion forums, group chats etc. enable peer interaction, sometimes even better than what happens in the classrooms. Regular classroom education is also being enhanced by such tools these days. Reliable testing & assessment is another development that will help do away with the perception of inferiority.

Generating Content at Large Scale

Although a lot of content is being generated for distance education, it isn’t quite enough to cover all the needs yet. Content will be generated at large scale if

  1. It is operationally easy, and
  2. It is financially feasible.

Content generation and capture tools need to work on these. CourseHub’s capture appliance, for example, lets the educational institutes record their regular classroom videos without any massive investment in infrastructure and without the need to have an army of IT staff. Automated process and cloud based offering reduces operational as well as financial hassles.

Delivery to Emerging Countries

As the experience of Coursera, Udacity etc. shows, large demand for high-quality educational content is coming from emerging countries. Although Internet penetration has increased substantially, the speeds available and reliability of the connection continue to remain issues in countries like India. Delivering video content over Internet is, therefore, still challenging here. CourseHub uses sophisticated, advanced video processing and compression technologies to make it possible to delivery good quality educational videos even at low bandwidths available in remote corners of India.

Conclusion

Many industries have been disrupted and enhanced by advent of new technology. Distance education is no exception. As the dwellers of knowledge economies, we are going to see demand for education accelerating. Distance education, aided by technological innovation, will be the answer to that demand.

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