Vision for Opencast Matterhorn 2.0

Matterhorn 2.0 will significantly extend Matterhorn 1.0 by strengthening core components and services and increasing the value of the content through tools with which teachers and learners can engage with the audio and video. 

The 2.0 release will revolve around two core themes. The first theme, “Video as a hub for teaching and learning,” includes tools for teaching and studying as well as an enhanced technical framework to enable more advanced access to media and data. The second theme, “Increasing value to the institutional enterprise,” focuses on deeper integration with other enterprise systems, expanding accessibility, and maximizing flexibility and the potential to leverage third party video tools to protect prior investments. Some specific areas of interest follow.

1. Video as a Hub for Teaching and Learning

The higher education community is increasingly seeing lecture capture, produced video, and rich media as core to its academic content. In Matterhorn 2.0, the video lecture will become a nexus for a variety of activities and content for a course, connecting students and professors to multiple threads of discourse. To effectively meet the needs of a broad range of disciplines, such as in the Arts and Humanities, the project will engage subject matter experts from within partner organizations and add instructional designers and educational technologists to the team in order to explore discipline-specific needs and provide critical design inputs to development efforts. 

Matterhorn 1.0 has released open APIs for external applications to pull descriptive data and links for video feeds. Through richer interactive tools and integration with central learning applications such as the Learning Management System (LMS), Opencast Matterhorn 2.0 will move from simple pull technologies to bi-directional integration.

Tools for Teaching and Studying

• Contextual Content: Manually add content references to videos, such as the course syllabus and related e-journal articles, or automated references to other lectures that use similar terms. Through this type of embedded linking, the video lecture becomes an interactive gateway to deeper learning.
• Bookmarking and annotating: Create a bookmark or write a note attached to a specific key frame within a video; can be shared, compiled, and collected within courses, study groups, or an open website. This functionality will create a more detailed level of discoverability of content embedded within video assets while also scaffolding tried and true meta -cognitive methods for the learners.
• Playlists: Created by the lecturer, teaching assistant, or student, and shared in a variety of interfaces such as Facebook or campus LMS.
• Study Reels: Similar to playlists, a way for students and professors to highlight critical study points for exams.
• Video Questions: Students can respond to key points in the lecture with textual-, audio-, or video-based questions.

Enabling faculty and learners through access and increased media analysis

Faculty can create educational content in a variety of ways and lecture video offers a low-cost method requiring minimal pedagogical modification. However, it is important for faculty to be able to more deeply engage with both individual learners and a cohort of learners as a whole. By manipulating, mining, visualizing, and interacting with lecture videos, faculty can explore their teaching both in content and in method.

• Authoring environment: Allows faculty to upload, share, and manage their rich content from web-based applications and their desktop, with authorization and authentication mechanisms in place. Provide easy-to-use tools to edit content for re-use, summarization and compilation (“online editor”).
• Data visualization: Hot spots or “footprints” representing usage data on videos, so teachers can track usage on their video lectures, and  students can quickly see the most viewed sections of video and jump to that spot.
• Re-use and Composition: Enables a professor to find, view and re-use other available video lectures within his/her course, as permissions allow.
• Enhanced discoverability: Includes integration of speech-to-text transcripts to enable viewers to search for keywords in the video.

2.    Increasing Value to the Institutional Enterprise

Within this theme, Matterhorn seeks to more fully meet the needs of a second archetypal institution, the “Sophisticate”. The “sophisticate” university requires expanded functionality, and more adaptable solutions that can be integrated more deeply with campus systems, enterprise applications (such as the LMS) and scale to meet wide deployment. In this regard, Opencast Matterhorn 2.0 will focus on:

• Core Service Development
  • More services and APIs to common campus systems
  • Continue to lower the cost of captioning through the integration of speech- to-text technologies to provide a basis for caption clean-up
  • Develop implementations that utilize shared services such as cloud-based storage and application environments
  • Develop an integration path for archiving of media for scholarly retrieval and preservation
  • Increase scaling and performance mechanisms
• Protect costly investments in hardware and software by developing modular services and creating wrappers for core functions
• Increase administrative functionality for editing, trimming, branding of media
• Academic Video Everywhere for Anyone
  • Design modular web-based interfaces for all Matterhorn functions that can be integrated into a variety of platforms such as Facebook or a LMS.
  • Develop services to provide portability of interaction data and metadata to support the portability of these interfaces.
  • Deliver device agnostic media that can be played on any Internet enabled device.
  • Improve accessibility through deeper integration of captioning tool and speech-to-text outputs.
• Establish robust third-party partnerships.

YouTube, Dim Dim, and Kaltura offer a range of video tools and environments. They all offer open APIs and are interested in supporting integration with Matterhorn, which enables institutions to leverage these products and to enable our adopters to create local tool mashups between these vendors and Opencast Matterhorn.