ITAC Minutes 2015-11-05

4:00 - 4:05 – Announcements

  • Student introductions

 Announcements

  • Shawn Bissell, current freshman in Trinity, Economics & Intl Comparative Studies.
  • Many of the faculty will have been asked for input on the faculty system interface; email was sent yesterday.  We hope you will give feedback.
  • Senior registration was today.  This was an uneventful success.  1200 students registered in one minute.
  • Undergraduate hackathon occurs this weekend.  Computer Science has the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) programing contest the same day.
  • Adobe products are now available; more information is available on the OIT website.

4:05- 4:30 – OIT Media Technologies Fall 2015 Update, Stephen Toback (15 minute presentation, 10 minute discussion)

What it is:  OIT Media Technologies implements and enhances university-wide programs that support the effective use of technology in learning, instruction, collaboration, and co-curricular student life.

Why it’s relevant:  Steve will provide an update of how the following services are being delivered and utilized at Duke:

  • Academic Video Production since January 2015
  • Warpwire is a secure online video publishing tool, allowing anyone with a Duke NetID to upload and share videos with other individual NetID holders, course groups, and with combinations of individuals and groups. Steve will discuss utilization and challenges along with a development roadmap
  • DukeFlyer – The easy, environmentally friendly way to distribute digital flyers across campus

Discussion

There have been big changes within this group.  We run many of the centralized media services.

  • DukeStream Live is still running; our Wowza server is still being used by many folks for live events.
  • We're still running iTunes and YouTube and Panopto (Duke Capture).
  • Digital Signage has a big update today.
  • AV Research and Consulting.

 Behind you today you'll see a glasses-free 3D TV.

 No longer in our group:

  • WebEx was launched in our group, but this has now moved to OIT Telecommunications.
  • The MPS Lab on West Campus, built by this group, is now managed by Lab Engineering.  The MPS Lab on East Campus has been converted to a general-purpose lab.

Media Technologies is adding Academic Media Production.

  • Videography
  • Editorial
  • Media Consultation
  • StudioONE

Academic Media Production works closely with CIT's online courses.

Warpwire update

Launched January 2015, running concurrently with Kaltura.

Kaltura at its peak had about 2400 users.  Warpwire allows use within Sakai and outside of Sakai, such as Wordpress embeds and other uses.  We've seen a big jump in users.

We've saved about $30,000 over what we were paying for Kaltura.

Kaltura was officially retired June 15.  The silence was deafening.  Todd Stabley did a great job managing this.

Working with Susan Starnes, we integrated our statistics into Tableau.  All of our statistics are now automated; we have an upgrade in December or January that offers more user-specific statistics for your videos.

Digital Signage: DukeFlyer

Today, if you want to promote your content, you would submit your flyer through a form which would email it to all subscribed sign owners.  Each sign owner who wanted to use this would have to download their own copy of the JPG image and add it to the content management system.  This was clunky and we wanted a better way.

We worked closely with Duke Web Services and their amazing team.  DukeFlyer will be coming out near the end of this month.  It's available for anyone with a NetID at flyer.duke.edu.  Upload a JPG image; the system automatically checks your file to make sure it's technically appropriate.  A sign owner then checks for pending images in a single interface, and accepts or rejects your file.  Approval results in the image being displayed on the sign automatically.  You'll get notified of the disposition by email.

DukeFlyer allows images to be reused for other services, like screensaver services or DukeMobile.

This also makes corrections or cancellations easy - a change in a single location updates all of the signs showing the image.

PNG or JPG files are accepted; these can be edited in PowerPoint or Keynote just as easily as in Photoshop.  The expected resolution is 1920x1080.

We want this up in the next couple of weeks, and then we'll make announcements in the normal forums.

(Demo of DukeFlyer.)

Academic Media Production

OIT began providing this service in January of 2015.

I (Steve Toback) came to Duke from the Walt Disney Company.  We had been producing videos for about two years before this, but now it's formalized.

We have eight courses completed, and 19 now in production.

We want to enhance production quality; when we're on platforms like Coursera, Duke's brand is out there.  Some of our most popular courses are shot simply, and there's a place for that, but we'd like to improve the grade of production as well.

We're beginning to use Chroma Key (the weatherman effect).

Lots of things are done in post-production, too.  We shoot the script and add slides later as we go.

(Demo of Daniel Eggers video.)

We're trying to get away from picture-in-picture, which is self-defeating on small screens like phones and tablets.

In StudioONE, a production professional actively assists the faculty member so they look and sound as good as possible.

In EditONE, there are two editorial suites; a small conference room just down the hall from this studio.

Enhanced Office: We want faculty members to be in their offices, but want them not to have to worry about the details of video production.  Students love seeing faculty members in their offices.

On Location: This is getting faculty out of the office: for example, geology instruction taught at a quarry, biology at Duke Lemur Center, and instruction at Duke Gardens.

Questions and Comments

Q: How do I find out what signs exist?

A: You'll see the list of locations in DukeFlyer.  We're also thinking about making a Duke map.

Comment: I'm concerned that every candidate for student government will submit a campaign sign, and the sign owners will be overwhelmed.

We've talked about having private feeds, and possibly distinguishing submissions by affiliation (student, staff, faculty, etc).

4:30- 5:30 – OIT Media Technologies Tour, Stephen Toback, Michael Blair, Mitch Donovan, Devon Henry, Brandon Johnson, Teresa Jennings,

What it is:  OIT Media Technologies will provide a tour of the various studios and technologies housed in the Telecom building.

Why it’s relevant:  Each of these technologies is being used to teach Online Courses.

  • The EditONE studio is where online courses are planned prior to recording, as well as editing digital content.
  • StudioONE is used to provide the instructor experience with the use of Teleprompters and green screen.
  • The Lightboard is a glass surface on which instructors can write or draw while facing the video audience.

ITAC members and guests will be divided into 3 concurrent small groups to spend about 20 minutes with each technology, viewing short presentations and experiencing the technologies first hand through interactive exercises.