Webcasting in Education, Reinventing the Classroom?

In a recent report The Future of Learning: New Ways to Learn New Skills for Future Jobs (http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC60869_TN.pdf) by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and Institute of Prospective Technological Studies a large group of experts in the domain of education and technologies for learning reflected upon the future of teaching and learning. Inevitably, also the question was also raised on how the classroom would be looking like in years to come. The large majority of experts was convinced that the classroom as we know it for as long as mankind seems to remember will remain the dominant model of delivery of learning for at least the medium term future. The ICT revolution brought by miniaturisation, digitalisation and compression has so far not yet entirely revolutionised the physical classroom ... for the simple reason that in a classroom, the first material with which a teacher must work long before the knowledge or technology is the human material. Still, technology has opened the classroom door for new applications, new methods of learning and teaching. Technology is an [important] enabler, and [...] it cannot replace people and teaching skills, [...] e-learning technology can permit remote students to acquire (parts of) their education from remote schools. Technology can lead to learning that is no longer restrained to a classroom anymore. The transmission of classroom recordings, of lectures or other educational content via for example webcasting is such a technology, with potentially a huge impact as it allows learners to follow classes from their own home for example. The availability of affordable technology and reliable networks has allowed nonprofessional content producers and even individuals to create their own media channels, a famous historic example being the JenniCam, live streaming video from a students dorm, one of the first successful webcasts. Webcasting is the transmission via streaming technology of audio and/or video content over the internet, so that the audience can view or listen no matter where they are. The content is captured by means of one or more cameras, screencams and microphones, encoded (converted to a popular streaming format, for example flash, windows media, QuickTime, real media) and then distributed (the actual broadcasting) to the target audience, which decodes the data-stream with a suitable player. Webcasts are streamed and cannot be downloaded (or recorded) on the individual viewers PC (or at least not without some clever tools and tricks). Increasingly, webcasting is being used in education to transmit live or pre-recorded seminars or for learning at a distance (for example http://webcast.cern.ch, http://videolectures.net or http://www.bednet.be). Webcasting is similar to watching TV; interactivity can be added to the programme by means of a return channel and is different to web conferencing, which uses the many-to-many interaction as its key feature. Webcasts are an affordable alternative to physically attending events or classes and allows in that way a theoretically unlimited expansion of the viewing audience to anyone that has an internet connection. What is needed to start web casting? At the side of the teacher or lecturer, you will need a multimedia capable computer with a good connection to the internet. One or more cameras and microphones will capture the images and sound that will feed into the encoder, which is installed on the PC and then transmitted towards a streaming server. Free encoders can be found from commercial as well as Open

Source developers (VideoLan, ffmpeg, Windows Expression Encoder etc.) The streaming server part is the trickiest part: free servers may provide limited capacity or duration, paid services allow for better quality of service, support, statistics and so on. Viewers only need a good quality internet connection, a multimedia PC with the right player installed. The whole webcast system itself requires remarkably little technical expertise, resources and effort. However, the main challenge remains to create effective learning experiences and to do so human interaction seems to be still the key to success. Interaction with a teacher who challenges the learning progress, answers questions on the spot works best. What is needed to make webcasts successful? Keep the audience in mind: access bandwidth, type of computer? Keep IT in mind: does the network allow the streaming, open ports, server capacity? Test the webcast well beforehand, certainly when it is a critical programme or when the circumstances of the webcast have changed (location, network, audience, even time of the day) Have a back up plan: make sure that the event is recorded so that learners can access the webcast afterwards. Take care of good camera, light and sound handling: position microphones in the optimal place to capture good quality sound, use camera movements sparsely, make sure your images are bright and sharp. Integrate additional learning and teaching materials as much as possible in the webcast itself, for example slides. Prepare the webcast event for interactivity.

Webcasting is not a TV show but does require certain amount of care in order not to scare away the learners with boredom or incomprehensible audio and poor image quality. Mathy Vanbuel