The Opencast Community releases Matterhorn 1.0, an open source solution for webcasting in academia

This week, an international consortium of universities, Opencast, released the first enterprise-level webcasting software application designed for and by higher education. Dubbed "Matterhorn 1.0", the open source application enables colleges and universities to broadcast course lectures over the internet at significantly reduced cost from proprietary systems.

Academic institutions can use Matterhorn to produce lecture recordings, manage existing video, publish video to the web, and enable students to engage with educational videos. As an open source platform with no licensing fee, Matterhorn is designed to affordably and efficiently scale according to an institution’s needs and the expected growth in academic video.

"The Opencast Community developed Matterhorn to meet the needs of a growing number of academic institutions which want to record course lectures and campus events for online viewing," said Mara Hancock, Director of Educational Technologies for UC Berkeley "The benefits of webcasting for students, lifelong learners, and colleges have become increasingly apparent, and the demand for a strategic approach and a coherent service to manage academic video is necessary to support this demand.  Unfortunately, until now the high costs of equipment, software licensing fees, and technical expertise have been a significant barrier, especially to mid-size and smaller institutions." The newly released Opencast Matterhorn offers a comprehensive solution for academic institutions to provide lecture and event recording and publishing to their campus and beyond.

Led by the University of California Berkeley, ETH Zürich, the University of Osnabrück, and the University of Saskatchewan, Opencast Matterhorn is a result of a two-year planning and development effort among thirteen North American and European partner institutions. It was funded through contributions of the partner institutions and $1.5 million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon and William and Flora Hewlett foundations.

The release of Opencast Matterhorn 1.0 marks a major milestone in the project, providing the first production-ready version for adoption at institutions.  A tour of Matterhorn’s features demonstrates how the system was built to address the needs of users in an academic environment –administrators, learners, and instructors. Some of Matterhorn’s most compelling features include:

• For learners, a fully accessible media player capable of multiple-stream full screen viewing that creates an engaging and effective learning experience, and integrates easily with existing campus content systems through embeddable media or RSS feeds
• For instructors, powerful media tools that automatically analyze video and extract text, enabling slide segmentation and in-video searching, further reducing the time and effort learners must put in to find relevant content
• For webcast administrators, a sophisticated dashboard enabling complete control over capture, processing and publishing of recordings
• For program administrators, an efficient scheduling tool for future recordings whether ad hoc or repeating for a full semester, as well as a strong API enabling customization for local needs
• For classroom infrastructure, specifications for building a low cost, low power capture devices that supports simultaneous recording of video (e.g. of the lecturer) and VGA output from a computer (e.g. the presentation)

Opencast Matterhorn is part of a growing collection of open source educational systems, such as Sakai and Kuali, where priorities are driven by and development is resourced by a community of adopting organizations. Opencast Matterhorn invites organizations to join its community and welcomes contributions toward the continued development effort. More information about the Opencast Community and the Matterhorn project is available at www.opencast.org/matterhorn.