• Working within Copyright
• Best Practice

Video is a powerful way to communicate an idea and has been a staple of the education experience for decades. From the old 16mm films like "Blood on the Highway" that teenagers were forced to watch for drivers education to the current elementary students and the use of multimedia in the classroom, video is a large part of the education experience. What has changed is the ability for the instructors to deliver video directly to students without the need for a film projector or DVD player.

There are several different technologies that exist that you can use to stream video. We have set up on campus a Windows streaming server that allows faculty to stream video content using the Windows Media Format. This is not the only video streaming format available, but it is the only format the campus currently supports. For this reason, this article will be focused on the Windows Media format.

There are two different ways to send video over the internet. There is "Progressive", which means that the video is downloaded to a students machine and played back from their machine; and "Streaming", which means that no information from the video is stored on the students machine, all information is read and then released by the machine.

With streaming video, the video needs to be compressed to a size that will allow the students to view it without pauses. Unlike "Progressive" video, streaming video is dependent on the students internet connection for smooth playback because the video is being played back as it arrives to the student computer.

Working within Copyright

From time to time instructors use media of all sorts in the classroom to illustrate important points. Take a look at how staying within copyright law changes when you start using streaming media.

Best Practice

There is more to streaming video than handing our a URL to your students. To effectively integrate streaming video into your course design there are a few rules you are going to want to follow.

Wikipedia entry on how to use the Windows Media Encoder

Microsoft page on video encoding

Beyond basic encoding from Microsoft