Multimedia Services for the Greek Higher Education community Dr. - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

ΝΑΤΙΟΝAL & KAPODISTRIAN UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS

Multimedia Services for the Greek Higher Education community

• Dr. Pantelis Balaouras

University of Athens Greek Academic Network – GUnet

About Greek Academic Network- GUnet

• GUnet began as project in 1997
• a joint effort undertaken by all Greek academic

institutions towards

• the creation of a nation-wide, high speed network
• a platform for advanced telematic applications
• GUnet was founded as a non-profit civil

company in September 2000

• Its members are all the Higher Education and Academic

Institutions (HEI)

• 20 Universities
• 16 TEI

GUnet – a human network

• A network of excellence at the

national level

• GUnet relies on and uses the

experience and the know-how of Network Operations Centers (NOC)

• A knowledge dissemination mechanism

focusing on supporting faculty members in using e-teaching and multimedia content production services

• Website: http://www.gunet.gr

Current GUnet’s Services

• deploying and supporting

centrally

• the Voice over IP network
• national wide virtual learning

environment

• providing and consulting in

designing broadband multimedia based services

• eLearning & Multimedia

Support Center

• Webcasting
• Web based

videoconferencing

• http://voip.gunet.gr
• http://www.openeclass.org
• http://mc.gunet.gr

Current scenarios and services

Scenarios/models

• Synchronous e-teaching model
• E-teaching classrooms
• Students from other HEI may attend from

the remote e-teaching classroom

• Lecture broadcasting
• Students may attend live the lecture from

their home

• Asynchronous e-learning model
• Students may access the organized

course material from their home

• Collaboration
• Desktop
• Video conferencing rooms

Services

• Video-conferencing
• H.323 /SIP
• Live video streaming
• Web-based course

management

• Multimedia production
• Video on Demand
• Web based

videoconferencing

• H.323/H.320 systems

Web-based course management

Open eClass platform

• Openeclass:
• an open source Course

Management System by GUnet

• links to video clips
• Goal:
• the incorporation and constructive

use of the Internet and web technologies in the teaching and learning process

• Website: http://openeclass.org

Usage

• Success story !
• 54 installations in the HEI
• courses online > 9.500
• registered users > 210.000
• teachers > 4.100 (33% of teachers)
• openEclass at UoA
• Courses > 2200
• Teachers >1000 (40%)
• Students >78.000

Contributed in creating “digital culture” in the Greek Academic community

Lesson learned

• Successful deployment model
• Centrally coordination for software implementation and

support

• Distributed s/w development
• Locally at HEIs
• s/w customization & service provision
• user support and training
• administration
• hosting
• An excellent interface to multimedia content

Multimedia production

eLearning and Multimedia Support Center

• Video production
• studio for recording lectures
• Digitization and processing
• video
• teaching material
• publishing video presentations
• DVD production
• Other services
• Webcasting
• H.323/H320 & Web based video conferencing

eLearning & Multimedia Support Center

• Aims at supporting by training
• the technical staff of the GUnet member institutions to

deploy and support such services

• Trainers of academic staff on how to use e-teaching

services

• Future plan
• Establish an eLearning and Multimedia Support Center at

each HEI

Webcasting lectures

• Live streaming
• Recording
• Publishing

Webcasting at HEIs

• Content
• Conferences and workshop are broadcasted
• No regular broadcasting of lectures
• Most universities use their own video streaming

server

• Gunet provides a service for announcing

webcasts

• http://vod.gunet.gr/announce/
• GRnet provides video streaming server at

national level

• http://vod.grnet.gr/

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Live streaming at UoA

• Dpt. of Informatics and Telecommunication
• 3 classrooms, 5 year 40 % lectures are broadcasted
• Recently 2 more classrooms were added
• Current status
• Migration from Real Network technologies (GRnet’s

helix server) to flash based

• Recording option is currently added
• Scheduler is added
• http://webcast.uoa.gr
• Plans for 30 classrooms

Live streaming at UoA

• Lecture

broadcasting and recording

• One way

transmission of:

• teacher’s video
• audio
• slides
• whiteboard
• No interaction with

students

Publishing content

• Academic video-lectures portal
• http://vod.uoa.gr
• S/W developed by UoA
• in the context of UoA’s, Gunet’s and Grnet’ projects.
• earlier versions are installed in GRnet’s and Gunet’s vod servers
• Supports:
• Formats: realvideo (Helix DNA), wmf (in Windows), flv formats
• Dublin core metadata
• Pilots
• Enable restricted access according the Shibboleth release attributes
• e.g., only users from Univ. of Athens, Dpt of Informatics can access a

video clip

• Interfaces to GRID infrastructure for transcoding video files and archiving

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Future plan

• Promote the lecture broadcasting and recording to

all HEIs

• Provide the s/w and service following the successful

model of openEclass

• Create points of content aggregations
• At Gunet & Grnet level
• Adopt Open Source Software
• Opencast project community
• http://opencastproject.org
• Evaluate, adapt/customize the s/w to the local needs, if

required

Digital TV for the Academic Community

http://iptv.grnet.gr

• Live sessions
• Hellenic (Greek)

Parliament

• Teleteaching classroom

GUnet (HD)

• DVB-T channels
• ERT S.A CINE+,

PRISMA+ channels

• Recorded events as

scheduled program

• 2 GRnet channels

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Future plans

• More channels
• Support:
• H.264 encoding
• flash player

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IPTV at Pan-european Level

• Broadcasting over the Pan European Academic and

Research Network (GEANT) :

• Content created by universities and research (500 +)
• Live sessions from the European and national

parliaments (28 +)

• Free satellite programs .. (300 +)
• DVB-T channels (200 + ?)
• An possible huge R&D testbed for networked

multimedia

• Is it feasible and at which cost?

Video conferencing

Video conferencing

• e-teaching classrooms
• GUnet created in 2003 a state of

the art e-teaching classroom

• Consulted other HEIs how to create

their e-teaching classroom

• At least one e-teaching classroom

at each HEI

• GRnet’s and HEIs’ Multipoint

Control Units are exploited

• Web-based video conference by

GUnet

• To all HEI

About Greek Academic Network (GUnet)

Future planning

• Upgrade audio-visual and video-conferencing

equipment for supporting High Definition (HD) video

• Upgrade the GUnet web-based video-conferencing

service to support application sharing

Thank you !

Contact details: P.Balaouras@noc.uoa.gr +30 210 7275603