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The aim of this version will be to facilitate the teaching of one or two existing courses from DTU with participants from either side of Øresund using free software wiki and streaming video technologies.
The strategy for this first version is to aim for the simplest possible setup that can work. Everything that isn't essential for reaching the goal will be pushed to Version 1.
It will consist of three parts:
This will include Standard text/images html, slides, assignments, video/audio lectures, etc.
Technical details: It could be as simple as a mediawiki with some plugins. Go to wiki website implementation to learn more about how we are planning to implement this.
This should include at least: Live audio/video streaming from one to many, many to many text chat and broadcasting from one to many of slides / screencasts simultaneously. Saving of lectures will be limited for this version in that slides / screencasts / chat conversations will not be saved with the audio/video. Upload to website will be a manual operation.
Technical details: There is no free software "ready to go" solution for this. We're working to assemble a solution from available open source code. Go to live lecture software implementation to learn more about how we are planning to implement this.
Lecturers will need the ability to edit lectures before upload.
Technical details: Open source video editing software exists. We will provide easy to use manuals for installing and using this software.
For the students connect to the lecture/wiki-site, everything should be implemented as a web-app with as little proprietary technology (flash) as possible.
For the broadcaster (lecturer), we will go with whatever software is open source and works. It is not a goal for this version that the software for the lecturer runs on all operating systems, nor that it is easy to use. An ubuntu-based live-cd will be created for the lecturer with accompanying documentation.
This version will focus on expanding the capabilities of the existing software to make it ready for a larger user-base. The goal for this version should be to make everything simple enough to use that lecturers and students can start using it without face-to-face training time with us (the developers).
The wiki-like website was actually running on existing wiki software for version 0. For version 1 we want to build a custom user-editable site which is built around the idea of a dependency system, where any article in the system will let you know which articles you should read before you're ready to understand the current article. E.g. you need to learn multiplication and division before proceeding to trigonometry.
More on this dependency system will be available soon (we are working on explanations with fake screenshots of all parts of the system).
The streaming software should integrate with the website for easy upload. It should be very easy to use, with features such as autodetection of available bandwidth and automatic adaption to current conditions. It should be able to use any video source (dv/firewire or webcam), and it should be able to save streams consisting of many different types of media such as video, audio, subtitles, slides, screen-casts, chat conversations, etc. It should be flexible enough that multiple instances of each type of media is supported.
Stream editing software should be built (expanding on existing video-editing software) that allows for editing of not just audio and video, but all other parts of the stream. It should be possible to change when slides appear, insert and delete slides, change synchronization between screencast and video and edit timing and content of subtitles. This should be integrated into the website so users can see the contents of each stream (e.g. this stream contains an hour-long lecture consisting of audio, video and 40 slides) and choose to only download a part of the stream.
The focus here will be on decentralization.
The decentralization will be two-tiered.
We want to eliminate the need for a hierarchy (lecturers vs. students) in the streaming software. We want to encourage anyone to set up their own classes, and enable different levels of teaching, e.g. it should be possible for anyone to start a full class, complete with video lectures and slides, all on their own, but we also want to enable users to take existing material and schedule "assisted teaching"-classes where a group will view a pre-recorded professional lecture together online and the assisting user(s) will help students with questions or assignments during and after the lecture, with features that allow the assisting user to pause the video lecture and jump in with their webcam+headset and talk to the students live.
We want to minimize the need for centralized bandwidth. At this point in development, many people will be using the software (we hope), and the needed bandwidth for all of this streaming video will become a prohibitive factor, even for a big university. The software should be adapted to connect users directly, instead of through the central server, and the streaming and downloading of static content should be offloaded from the server using technologies like BitTorrent DNA.