JISC

Overview

The vision for the Steeple project is to streamline enterprise level podcasting and support a viable community around scalable, enterprise-level solutions, in the areas of automated video/audio capture, processing and delivery.

Educational video and audio is undergoing a step change, posing new requirements on institutional workflows that have high overlap between institutions. Particularly the availability of affordable recording techniques as well as new distribution channels has changed the way in which audio and video visual material is used in UK higher education. The Steeple project will look at the processes supporting effective use of audio and video (“podcasts”) using emergent technologies that can streamline complex audio-visual encoding activities through enterprise level services. Steeple will increase efficiency in creating audio visual materials for teaching, research and outreach.

The project is a partnership between the University of Oxford, Cambridge and the Open University.

Aims and objectives

The projects main aims are:

• Reducing costs for media processing and media management through technical innovations around implementing enterprise level audio video encoding
• Making it easier to deliver media into channels important to the institution, such as iTunesU and an institutional web portal
• Supporting and documenting adoption of best practice for sustainability of the architecture and to ensure longevity of any institutional investments

Project methodology

The project is a partnership between three leading institutions and podcast practioners: the Learning Technologies Group, University of Oxford, CARET, University of Cambridge and KMI at The Open University.

The Steeple development work primarily falls into four areas. Parallel work packages are taking place through-out the project life with ownerships and collaboration depending on needs and expertise within the three intuitions.

• Integration of the encoding engines and creation of encoding scripts and workflows
• Further development work to an online database to monitor and track processes
• Redesigning the web based delivery channel podcast.ox.ac.uk
• Best practice models and documentation

Steeple will look at:

• Scoping, requirements, use cases
• Policies, processes, workflows
• Requirements for public access to video/audio
• Private access to video/audio via LMS or VLE
• Encoding engines, and related management
• Service management
• Training and support
• Evaluation and dissemination

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The projects documented outputs include:

• Exemplar best practice and innovation in this area through documented institutional activities
• Community building and dissemination activities, including workshops and a conference on April 3rd 2009.
• Documentation on designing and implementing media processing and media management architecture for large scale audio video processing and management.
• Programming workflows and scripting tools to support encoding and delivery of media into channels important to an institutions, such as generic institutional web based podcasting portals and iTunesU.
• Demonstrator institutional web podcasting portal and a demonstration aggregation web tool of subject specific material across the 3 partner institutions.
• Documentation for adoption of standards, for content workflow, accessibility, management, legal issues. Best practice for sustainability of the architecture and to ensure efficiencies in staff support and longevity of any institutional investments.

The standards used will mainly be connected with podcasting feeds, audio and video encoding, feed aggregation and web service calls between third party systems. Standard formats for podcasting are currently RSS 2 and in the future ATOM. OPML is being investigated for providing an umbrella XML overview of sets of feeds and material. Multimedia formats include MP3 for audio, MPEG4 umbrella video formats ( H264 codecs etc ). Metadata for content is often stored in XML

Lead Institution

• Learning Technologies Group, University of Oxford

Project partners

• CARET, University of Cambridge
• Knowledge Media Institute

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