University of Manchester Installs 350-Room Lecture Capture Solution To Meet Students' Learning Needs

As a result, the University of Manchester changed its lecture capture policy.

“[The school] created a new policy and that states we’ll record all lectures by default, unless an academic expresses a preference not to be recorded,” Phillipson says. “We didn’t see as much objection as we expected. We record about 76 percent of lectures now, only about 24 percent of people object to being recorded.”

Phillipson also say the install presented some technical challenges.

“The time table contains about 200,000 individual events and we needed a software application that could filter the time table, find all the lectures, who teaches them, and individually contact all those people,” he says. “This is more than 2,000 academics. Then it needed to allow them to express a preference on the per-lecture basis, whether they’d like to be recorded or not. Our time tabling system is built around something called Syllabus Plus, which is made by Scientier, and the company that we commissioned to do that again was Entwine…We got right into a module for Opencast, so it’s just like a plugin. The plugin connects to our time table and its data and makes it into a rational recording list and handles all the staff email preferences and recording, and managing the recordings themselves.”

Olaf A. Schlute, the chair of the OpenCast board, says the university was able to overcome these adversities via OpenCast’s open source community.

“The basis [of OpenCast] was established to be a community of academic institutions who were interested in pursuing that path of open source video management system and continue to invest in that particular system by either spending money or providing development resources,” he says. “[Stuart] felt welcome in our community because we [also] shared many other interests beyond the media lecture capture…There were a number of reason he was leaning towards Opencast as an open source solution.”

The University of Manchester also received help from Entwine, which kept the school connected to OpenCast’s supported, and supported the lecture capture system technically.

“We wear multiple hats,” says Tobias Wunden, Cofounder and CTO of Entwine. “One hat we’re wearing at Entwine is to assist University of Manchester to be a member and part of that open source community. The second hat is we were consulting with Stuart’s team, as well as most of the infrastructure team at the University of Manchester, so that’s networking, storage, etc.…we were able to assist almost everything that would be impacted by the lecture capture installation… It’s a lot of data, need a lot of bandwidth, etc. that you would never reach…The installation at Manchester had a quite a size, a lot of machines, staging environments, development environments, production environments…we helped them sculpt the systems and come up with a design that would scale and implemented it for them.”