opencast matterhorn at uct

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Opencast Matterhorn at UCT Stephen Marquard, Roger Brown, David Horwitz, Edmore Moyo Centre for Educational Technology University of Cape Town 6 June 2012

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The implementation of the Opencast Matterhorn lecture capture framework at the University of Cape Town. Presented at the Opencast Community Unconference, Harvard, 6 June 2012.

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Page 1: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Stephen Marquard, Roger Brown,David Horwitz, Edmore Moyo

Centre for Educational TechnologyUniversity of Cape Town

6 June 2012

Page 2: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Our Matterhorn journey

• Identified an emerging need on campus: demand for solutions and proliferation of DIY solutions.

• UCT staff survey: 78% of lecturers would make some recorded lectures available to their students, 60% would make some lectures public (Dec 2010, n=176), 9% doing some DIY recording

• $50,000 allocated for equipment in 2011 (approx $60K in 2012), as a side-effect of including lecture recording in a larger project

• Looked at proprietary solutions but either too costly or not aligned with enterprise architecture

• Early proof of concept of Matterhorn from Nov 2010• Week-long on-site training and consultancy with Entwine, Oct 2011• Launched production pilot in Feb 2012 on Matterhorn 1.3• Expecting demand to scale up (possibly to 50 venues)

Page 3: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Why consider lecture recording?

• Better student support within courses

• Value to students and staff not in the course– Across courses

(same year)– Same course,

previous years

• Potential for wider dissemination of UCT’s expertise (Afropolitan focus, OpenContent, OpenUCT)

• Challenges addressed

1) Students whose first language is not English often struggle to understand the content of face-to-face lectures

2) Lectures are content-packed with limited time for discussion

3) Students are sometimes absent for reasons beyond their control

4) Student attention and engagement within a lecture can vary a lot

Page 4: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

UCT survey

What proportion of your lectures do you record yourself?

If your lectures could be automatically recorded, what proportion of your lectures would you like to be available to …

your students the public

CET 2010 Educational Technology Staff Survey

1 to 15 Dec 2010, 176 respondents

Page 5: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

What it means for lecturers

• If you teach in an equipped venue, you may choose to have your lecture(s) recorded

• You may need to clip on a lapel mic, but do not need to do anything technical before, during or after.

• You may choose how to share the recording:a.Course cohort only (your students)

b. University-wide (any UCT students or staff)

c. Public (anyone)

Page 6: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

lecture recording in action

Three channels:• Audio• Camera• Screen

(VGA output)

Allows navigation by slides or timeline

Shows viewing statistics (hotspots)

Online playback, or download

Page 7: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Matterhorn in Sakai CLE with LTI

A Matterhorn tool is placed in the Sakai site using the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard.

The LTI tool is preconfigured with the Series ID.

Page 8: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Self-service scheduling in the LTI tool

http://opencast.jira.com/browse/MH-8315

Allow instructors to schedule their own recordings and update recording metadata (title, description)

Page 9: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Matterhorn Dashboard

We graph a set of metrics (activity, throughput, response time) with mrtg using REST queries and a few direct database queries.

View it live at http://media.uct.ac.za/mrtg/dashboard/

We also have Sintrex monitoring of servers and agents.

Page 10: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

JIRA integration

We manage recording requests and related tasks in JIRA.

A custom script will place the LTI tool in the right Sakai site and also create JIRA issues for any workflow failures in the series.

Page 11: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Matterhorn Deployment

• 4 SLES VM instances (1 x admin node, 1 x Red5 streaming server, 2 x worker nodes)

• mysql 5.1 database• Storage on SAN, shared by nfs• 15 Ubuntu capture agents in venues (small

Dells)• Workflow for handling recording requests uses

JIRA integrated with Matterhorn (though still too manual)

Page 12: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Venue equipment

• Custom-built Capture Agents (Dell Optiplex 780 USFF)

• Epiphan USB2VGA• Logitech C910 webcam• MXL AC404 USB Conference Mics• Integration with venue audio systems• IP Cameras

Page 13: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Scale

• 15 equipped venues• 8 active venues Feb-May 2012• 1605 distinct users to date• Peak activity:

– 28 recordings / week– 25 concurrent streaming users– 148 distinct users in 24 hrs– 75 distinct recordings viewed in 24 hrs

Page 14: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

Audio

• High reliability in simple venues (USB conference mic)• 50% reliability in some venues with lapel mics:

– Flat batteries– User behaviour– Missing microphones– Inadequate in-venue support

• New audio strategy: combination of mics for amplification and recording-only mics (e.g. boundary mics), auto-selected / mixed with Digital Signal Processor

• Involved in a project to redesign the A/V support services on campus (design, installation, support)

Page 15: Opencast Matterhorn at UCT

R&D

Speech recognition (Sphinx4)

http://www.slideshare.net/smarquard/open-textspeech-recognition-in-opencast-matterhorn

Intend to start a broader applied research and evaluation project

Interested in Arduino- or Raspberry-Pi based venue displays and controls