Podcast at ETH Zurich

Friday, 29 February 2008

Ein im Prinzip ähnlicher Artikel auf Deutsch und Französisch wurde auf der Website von Apple, Inc. publiziert.

Apple Profile in Success
ETH Zurich strengthens its world image with Podcast Producer

COMARK COMMUNICATIONS

Synopsis
Zurich based university ETH aims to maintain its world-class reputation for science and technology learning with the help of Apple's new Podcast Producer. It will use Podcast Producer to capture and make available online its own academic leader's lectures, as well as those from distinguished visitors. Displaying its achievements will strengthen the ETH image within the world!s science community, and help to attract bright young academics for the future.

“What we really love about Podcast Producer is the way it makes a complex process of recording and processing many types of content quite simple. It really leverages existing technology very elegantly”, says Roger A. Rebetez, Podcast Manager at ETH. “And technology has become key in a highly competitive global science community.”

Vision
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) has a long and proud international reputation in science and technology education and research. It can boast 21 Nobel Prize laureates who have studied, taught or conducted research at the university – including the physicist, Albert Einstein.

Located in a country of only 7.5 million people, ETH has always reached across the world to attract academic talent. Its 18,000 staff and students hail from 80 different nations. ETH supports a wide array of international research projects, and has a regular stream of visiting professors and lecturers.

ETH recognised that its own academic resources, and high quality visiting academics and public figures, offered an important tool in maintaining its status and competitiveness in international science and research.

“We started to ask ourselves how nobody recorded science luminaries such as Einstein in the past, and decided we must capture the knowledge of our scientists of today,” explains Mr. Rebetez. “We were conscious that technology was developing fast, giving us new channels to distribute this content across the world, using streamed videos on the Internet and the ability to download to iPod – particularly attractive to young people assessing the universities where they want to apply.”

What was needed
ETH invested in infrastructure and let some of the 21 people employed at Multimedia Services enhance the mainly manual lecture recording process. Now there are seven lecture theatres equipped with Mac mini computers connected to the projectors.

The first eight lectures recorded included a speech by the Dalai Lama when visiting the university. The multimedia team added older material, even by digitising analogue film. The content was uploaded to a Podcast portal, which ETH had made its strategic access point for all multimedia objects. The interest from across the world exceeded the university!s expectations.

“We knew we had a potential success on our hands, with the portal providing a great window into ETH,” says Mr. Rebetez. “We also knew we had to respond to demand for much more content, and a more efficient and automated way of capturing it.”

The team set itself a target of recording 150 lectures a week by 2009 – about 10% of the total. To meet the target it started to plan for automating as much of the recording process as possible, and organising the content.

Its first initiative was to develop a software tool in house, called Replay. The tool was designed to automate recording in lecture halls, provide indexing for content, long-term archiving, easy identification of all multimedia objects, and diverse methods of distribution.

“We are proudly multi-platform as an institution, so we try to be as self-sufficient in technology as we can. At the same time, we are one of Apple!s biggest university customers in Europe, with Xserve servers and Xsan storage solutions implemented. We also use Apple!s Xgrid distributed computing architecture. In my group we have nine Mac to one PC, and across the university, Mac probably represents about one third of all laptops and desktop computers.”

“So we always look out for how Apple technology developments can help us deliver our education objectives,” says Mr. Rebetez.

When he and colleagues visited Apple!s Worldwide Developers Conference, they saw an early version of Podcast Producer, and recognised its “huge potential” for simplifying the process of recording content, encoding and distributing it. The team now plans to use Podcast Producer with its Mac minis from January 2008, and review how the Replay tool can work in tandem, so that the two systems can add value to each other.

What was the result
“The most important benefit of Podcast Producer will be the way it automates recording and processing of content, to help us meet our target,” says Mr. Rebetez. “We will be able to automatically start and stop recording with minimal intervention, and capture audio and VGA in a very simple way. It will be much less resource intensive for our team.”

Another significant advantage is that Podcast Producer can be used to manage different content formats. “In designing Replay, we defined some formats that we must be able to deliver, such as Windows Media, Flash and H264 advanced video coding,” he says. “We know that Apple's partner Telestream will provide that support with Episode Podcast and we can distribute a richness of content via iTunes for iPod or MP3 download, or for accessing on a website or a blog. It just opens up so many possibilities – from mobile phones to high definition.”

He is particularly impressed with Podcast Producer's workflow manager. “The way it takes a file from the client and processes it, and has all these features to recognise when a file has failed or isn't delivered properly – it's all really good,” he says.

Mr. Rebetez says that Podcast Producer is a cost-effective solution because it is integrated with Mac OSX Server. “It means that we just have to upgrade the operating system for our Mac minis, and we are equipped. It's very important to academic budgets that we don't have to buy additional software.”

“It's also rather easy to install,” he says, “very scalable, and can be easily integrated into the ETH IT infrastructure. My hope is that Podcast Producer is going to take the academic world by storm, and the user community will grow very fast. That means it's likely to further improve and get good levels of support from Apple.”

What happens next ETH will continue to develop its Replay tool, making it partly compliant with Podcast Producer. “I believe that in future we could use modules of Podcast Producer within Replay, or perhaps share Replay modules with the Podcast Producer community, where it offers additional functionality – in archiving and indexing for example,” says Mr. Rebetez.

The university has its own virtual learning environment, and as content grows, the team will seek ways to make it available through that channel. With so many overseas students at ETH, the ability to listen again to lectures in a second language could significantly assist their learning.