Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
Southeast Community College: Building the Video Campus, One Brick at a Time
11/26/2002
In
southeast Kentucky, a small community college is on the forefront of a movement
to make video recording, production and distribution a simple and practical
option in the educator's toolkit. Southeast Community College, one of five campuses
in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, is using a new video
multicasting technology that allows it to convert classrooms into video-production
facilities capable of producing and pumping video throughout the entire college
system.
Southeast CC, which offers classes in broadcasting and telecommunications, has a new full-blown television studio. The faculty there is now using "video appliances" from VBrick Systems to distribute video signals from the television studio into campus classrooms, to send conventional television and cable throughout the campus LAN, and to turn any classroom into its own television studio.
"We already had videoconferencing technology," said Charlie Simpson, Southeast Community College director of technology. "What we lacked was the ability to stream video from our television studio to our [interactive TV] network. Now … we can plug in a camera and microphone system and create a television studio in any of our classrooms, theatres or laboratories. We take the information, pump it across the network into the studio and then decide how we want to distribute it, whether it's across the IP network or across the Web."
Each of the five campuses has a LAN. On the main campus at Southeast, material is distributed throughout the LAN from the television studio. Because the other campuses don't have a television studio to distribute the signal, the video is routed on the existing interactive TV backbone, a T1 line. Once the material is received at the other campuses, it is distributed to the desktop via that campus's LAN. "VBrick allows us to bring a signal from the TV studio to the classrooms on the other campuses and also allows us to distribute television and cable," says Simpson. "We're transmitting out of the classrooms as if they were TV studios."
VBricks are a family of network appliances or "video bricks," video-on-demand systems, and related components for one-way or two-way television over IP, ATM, and T1/E1 networks. The technology supports IP multicast for transmitting and receiving MPEG audio/video.
In multicast networking, a computer d'es not send its traffic to another computer. Rather, it sends it to a special address whose physical location is inside a router or switch. A multicast client can then inform the router that it wants to receive a multicast stream. When informed, the router replicates the traffic to that client and to all other clients wanting to join the session.
"What we've been able to do with the VBrick is to create a closed-circuit television network in our interactive classrooms," he continues. "Now we can stream video and audio across the network and provide connectivity to classrooms that didn't exist before."
That's been a benefit to Southeast CC's nursing program.
Recommended Reading
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
- The Quilt Coalition Rolls Out XO Communications for High-Capacity Network Services
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
- Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
- Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
- Cognos Releases BI Software for Linux-based IBM System z Mainframe
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
- Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
