Streaming Video in Higher Education Has Had a Slow Evolution

In 最近的一篇博客文章, 流媒体的 Dan Rayburn reflected on the 20th anniversary of the streaming media industry. 他标志着1995年4月RealAudio 1的发布.作为行业的诞生. I’ve also been thinking back on the field’s evolution, especially in education.

Though it often seems like it took a long time for educators to embrace streaming media fully, colleges and universities were among the earliest adopters. With easy access to broadband internet when most homes only had dial-up, some faculty and staff could cobble together the resources to experiment. Often this only required a free or reduced-cost server license and a good-enough computer to do the serving. Still, it would take most of the past 20 years for streaming in education to mature.

My first opportunity to play with streaming media came as a graduate student around 1997. As a graduate assistant I worked at a language lab that deployed a Real Server, mostly as a testing ground for technologically savvy faculty. 因为我有强烈的兴趣, I was tasked with understanding it and figuring out how it might be used.

It would be a few years until my department was ready to consider seriously offering streaming media as a service. That happened when I started my first full-time position in 2000. I started digitizing foreign language programs that students listened to on cassettes in language labs, 目的是把它们放到网上. 这是一个有趣的过程, 但这是一个挑战, because our service level quickly went from “good luck” to “has to be there.”

I recall vividly the resistance I encountered from faculty who were not ready. I found an ally in one professor willing to investigate his colleagues’ trepidation. What he discovered is that several members of the faculty had computers that were too old and slow to play back even audio streams. 完全可以理解, 他们推断，如果学生有类似的问题, 那就会影响到他们的任务.

Similar situations would pop up over the first decade of the millennium as my department started producing and serving video. Each step forward in quality and commensurate increase in bandwidth required careful consideration. Although students living in dormitories enjoyed access to the high-speed campus network, we also had to keep in mind off-campus students with slow connections or bandwidth-hogging roommates. 相信我, if students can’t watch a required video the night before the exam, you’ll hear about it whether there’s a problem with your infrastructure or not.

你看到, most educators couldn’t afford or didn’t even know about online video platforms that could automatically transcode and catalog their videos, 根据需要匹配用户的带宽. 相反，我们只是手动转码, 通常以多个比特率, 上传文件到服务器, 张贴网站的连结, 抱着最好的希望. 原始，但功能齐全.

So when the first OVPs designed for education arrived on the scene in the late 2000s it was an absolute revelation for those of us working on the front lines. It was a great leap forward because we could reallocate the effort previously dedicated to keeping track of files, 版本, 和链接, 把更多的时间花在制作更好的视频上.

尽管这些担忧现在看来有些古怪, online learning professionals still must deal with questions of compatibility. The shift to mobile devices, in particular, still presents a challenge. Whereas just a couple of years ago you might have been able to tell a class that they had to watch their video assignments on an actual computer, today there’s a growing number of students whose only computing device is a smartphone or tablet. It then becomes an issue of equity and accessibility when you assign videos that aren’t mobile-ready.

It’s clear to me now that most educators weren’t afraid of online media. Instead, they understood that to support a service is to make a commitment to your stakeholders.

Today’s video-rich education is built on those early experiments and risks taken by forward-looking administrators. 过去的二十年可谓是波澜起伏. 我很期待接下来的创新.

本文发表于2016年4月/ 5月号 流媒体杂志 “21年的流媒体."