University of Alabama in Huntsville
The University of Alabama is using Microsoft® Windows Media® and Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2003 to expand its academic offerings to students who are unable to attend conventional classroom-based programs, to share knowledge with students and colleagues in Europe, and to assist community-based groups desiring improved communication and training efficiency.
The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) is dedicated to excellence in teaching, research, and service. It is ranked among the top universities in the United States for the study of science and technology and is a Carnegie research-intensive university designee. UAH was founded in the late 1950s to support the early space program's scientific and engineering mission at the nearby NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. Today, the university has grown to serve a diverse academic community and presently offers 42 bachelor's degree programs, 17 master's degree programs, and eight Ph.D. programs through its five colleges.
In 1999, UAH began combining slides and video using Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 as part of a collaborative education project between UAH and the French engineering school, ESTACA. Intending to use the internet to share engineering knowledge between faculty and students of both institutions, the project's planners needed a solution to create and cost-effectively distribute videotaped lectures and engineering information. Windows Media offered an excellent solution for streaming content, but UAH and ESTACA lacked an easy-to-use, rich-media authoring tool.
In addition to needing a production tool, UAH wanted to increase the value of its traditional academic offerings, provide educational opportunities to students that are unable to attend traditional classroom-based programs, and offer its services to the community outside academia.
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With the release of Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint 2002 in late 2001, many pieces settled into place for a successful collaboration between UAH and ESTACA and for other distance learning projects both on and off the UAH campus.
UAH and ESTACA's rich, streaming media partnership continues today and is now powered by the current version of the popular add-on for PowerPoint, Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003. Additionally, 12 nursing classes, six engineering classes, the Center for Robotics, and the UAH Administrative Science College are all creating fully indexed, rich-media presentations by using Producer 2003 to capture, synchronize, and publish audio, video, slides, images, and HTML content. All rich-media course material is either published to a CD or delivered directly to the remote audiences online using streaming media and with Producer 2003, the content is playable on both PC and Macintosh desktops.
UAH employs one Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition to manage rich-media content distribution. Many faculty presentations are simply recorded with USB cameras and lapel microphones directly to a laptop or desktop computer. Users requiring a higher-quality finished product take advantage of the Division of Continuing Education's new, fully featured digital media classroom in the UAH library. The 30-seat facility is equipped with remotely controlled digital video cameras, digital audio and video mixers, a document camera, special lighting, and a Producer 2003-based control room. Specifically designed to record and encode the highest quality content, UAH's state of the art learning facility is exciting students and faculty users and is expected to prompt additional growth in the university's distance learning offerings. In all cases, faculty slides are synchronized with video and audio using Producer 2003, and then the fully indexed presentations are published to CD and to the UAH student Internet at both 150 and 300 Kbps.
"Windows Media and Producer 2003 enable us to easily make the content of UAH classes available to students through the Internet and on CDs," says Robert Middleton, Senior Research Engineer, UAH Office of the Provost. "We have developed a very cost-effective and rapid production process that offers students high-quality educational material on and off campus. All indications show that it is actually enhancing learning by giving students what they need, when and as often as they need it."
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In addition to using Windows Media and Producer 2003 to communicate with colleagues and students in remote locations, UAH also offers its services to the community outside academia. The Alabama Automobile Manufacturers Association and the National Children's Advocacy Center (NCAC) are among the organizations benefiting from UAH's experience and success with streaming rich-media content.
The NCAC is a nonprofit agency that provides prevention, intervention, and treatment services to physically and sexually abused children and their families. The center also offers child abuse prevention, intervention, and investigative training to law enforcement, public child protective services, prosecution, mental health, and medical and educational agencies throughout the United States. Prior to working with UAH, all NCAC distant learning presentations were distributed using an expensive leased satellite broadcasting system. Forced to spend $11,500 per single satellite broadcast, the NCAC sought a less expensive and more full-featured solution.
Learning of UAH's success with streaming rich-media educational content on the Internet, NCAC requested the University's help in developing a similar production and distribution system for its distance learning program. Honored to provide assistance and eager to test and expand its own streaming media capabilities, UAH took on the NCAC project and has now contributed key technological and production services for three successful pilot tutorials delivered to participants as both unicast and multicast streams. The NCAC and UAH are currently reviewing the pilot program, titled Academy Online, and are making plans for future collaborative projects.
Academy Online pilot tutorials consist of two components: a prerecorded streaming tutorial, followed by a live session with the child abuse subject-matter professional answering questions submitted by telephone and e-mail. The professionals prepare presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint slides and videotape support material. Presentations are prerecorded and then easily synchronized with slides and video support content on the Producer timeline. Complete presentations are published and distributed as both unicast and multicast streams to participating sites over the Internet and Internet2 (an education-specific Internet service). The completed tutorials are broadcast live to registered sites at scheduled times and are immediately followed by the live, interactive question-and-answer session. Replicating a traditional classroom experience online, the presenter's responses are encoded live and distributed to the entire audience by means of streaming media.
Producer also provides NCAC with additional features previously unavailable with the satellite tutorial method. New Academy Online capabilities include the capacity to capture and encode the question-and-answer session for re-broadcast, inclusion with an archived tutorial, or CD distribution of the tutorial for newly registered sites or those unable to attend the premier broadcast. Using Producer also means that an index is automatically generated for the presentation, enabling viewers to select topics and move through the tutorials at their own pace. Response to the Internet-based approach has been very positive, and participants from institutions across the country have subsequently expressed interest in developing their own streaming media solution for academic and training needs.
"We worked closely with UAH to ensure that an audience of more than 80 professionals was able to clearly view each two-hour long presentation using a high-intensity projection system and notebook computer with 100 megabits per second switched Ethernet connections," says William Kearns, Director, Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida. "We found the video stream was received at a nearly constant 29.97 frames per second using the Internet2 connection between our two sites. The professionals found the presentations very useful and indicated they would consider receiving additional training via this technology."
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UAH and ESTACA students and faculty, Huntsville area organizations, and child abuse prevention professionals across the nation all benefit from the University's streaming, rich-media initiative.
Students unable to enroll in conventional on-campus programs are now able to complete degrees from remote locations. Class material, often prepared by professors from their offices or homes using lap or desktop computers, is available to students whenever they like and as often as they need. UAH considers the availability of online, rich-media classes a great enhancement to education, and fully expects program offerings to increase as more departments and faculty are exposed to the capabilities.
The 2003 school year finds the joint UAH and ESTACA engineering class relying heavily on the ease and power of Windows Media and Producer for all presentations. Dr. Robert A. Frederick, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UAH and initiator of the joint project, says, "We just completed an eight-hour symposium and provided a CD of rich-media presentations to 100 people as they walked out the door. By prerecording the last four hours of presentations and several French presentations, Producer was flexible and fast enough to allow us to publish the first four hours during the symposium and then duplicate the CDs before the people left that day. This capability greatly augments the Web presentation, helps our students and the professional community."
Future enhancements to the UAH online learning system include the addition of synchronized closed captioning with Producer-based presentations. The university is currently evaluating available text-captioning solutions that will provide an equal level of education service to the hearing impaired, students with low bandwidth Internet connections, and audience members who do not speak English.
Click here to see the UAH sample presentation enhanced with closed captioning  .
Outreach to the community is likely to grow as well. NCAC has already seen significant cost and feature benefits with the tutorial pilot project. The capital investment in hardware and software has been small, and production costs per session are less than half the price of one $11,500 satellite broadcast. The NCAC will save nearly $10,000 for the first five rich-media tutorials versus the same number of satellite broadcasts. Over five years, with the inclusion of live question-and-answer capabilities, Internet re-broadcasts, and easy CD production capabilities, the NCAC expects a nearly 400 percent return on its initial investment.
"Academy Online is the NCAC's effort to expand training opportunities to child abuse professionals through the use of the Internet," says Connie Carnes, executive director, National Children's Advocacy Center. "The debut of Academy Online would not have been possible without the technical knowledge and encouragement of UAH. Because of this partnership between UAH and NCAC, hundreds of professionals across the country have access to high-quality training."
Dr. Derald Morgan, Vice President for University Advancement at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, says, "UAH has a team of professionals who have demonstrated their commitment to advancing the state of the art in telecommunications, networking, and software engineering, as well as utilizing these advancements in practical applications for the betterment of society. The combined effort of UAH and the National Children's Advocacy Center, utilizing Microsoft tools, has created such an opportunity. We are gratified by the cooperation received from our project partner, assistance from Microsoft, and by the results achieved."
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At the Association for Continuing Higher Education's (ACHE) national conference, held in late 2003, UAH's Division of Continuing Education was honored with the Creative Use of Technology Award., which recognizes innovative uses of instructional and distance learning technologies. The award was presented to the division for its role in developing and delivering the streaming media-based training for the National Children's Advocacy Center.
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This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
© 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft, PowerPoint, Windows, the Windows logo, and Windows Media are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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