Matterhorn Overview

Matterhorn is...

Matterhorn is a free, open-source platform to support the management of educational audio and video content. Institutions will use Matterhorn to produce lecture recordings, manage existing video, serve designated distribution channels, and provide user interfaces to engage students with educational videos. Matterhorn includes the following features:

• Administrative tools for scheduling automated recordings, manually uploading files, and managing metadata, captioning and processing functions
• Recommended capture agent hardware specifications
• Integration with recording devices in the classroom for managing automated capture
• Processing and encoding services that prepare and package the media files according to configurable specifications
• Distribution to local streaming and download servers and configuration capability for distribution to channels such as YouTube, iTunes or a campus course or content management system
• Rich media user interface for learners to engage with content, including slide preview, content-based search and captioning

Matterhorn is also a framework of media services. It is therefore highly configurable to meet individual institutional needs.

Value to institutions

For institutions who want to easily produce audio and video webcasts and podcasts, Matterhorn significantly lowers the technical and cost barriers to entry. Matterhorn is an easy-to-install, out-of-the-box system with automated workflows.

For institutions who want to replace, expand or evolve their existing commercial or homegrown systems, Matterhorn is highly configurable and services-based, so that organizations can choose to implement only the components they need, or replace default service implementations with their own to meet specific institutional needs. Read more about how institutions can get involved in Matterhorn.

Matterhorn is backed by a large community comprised of world-class experts in many domains relevant to audio and video technology as well as academic content production and delivery. Through the engagement of the Opencast Community, Matterhorn will continue to evolve in response to advances in technologies, emerging needs of end users, and lessons learned by all along the way.

Roadmap

After a year-long planning and community-building effort, development officially kicked off in July 2009 (read more about the project's background). Matterhorn 1.0 was released in the Fall of 2010 as the first production-ready release for adoption and implementation. Several institutions have implemented a pilot or deployment since that time, from which the project has gained insight to guide further needs and priorities - the release of Matterhorn 1.1 in spring 2011 reflects some of these. The summer of 2011 will see the release of 1.2 and the development effort toward Matterhorn 2.0 is underway - contributions from the community are welcome!

The Challenges We Face

The Matterhorn project was inspired by a common set of challenges that we face as a community, including:

• High costs and constraints of vendor solutions
• Proprietary code lock-in (closed source)
• Patchwork quilt of technologies and research projects - great systems that can't play together well
• Limited enterprise integraton with SIS or CLE/LMS
• Rich media accessibility (and associated benefits)
• Lack of learning tools
• Rapidly changing technology

Guiding Principles

1. Lower Costs

Matterhorn aims to make lecture capture affordable for institutions just starting an academic podcasting program, as well as integrate with existing infrastructure for those institution who have already invested in a program. With features like easy to manage instructor participation and capture scheduling, automated workflows for processes such as encoding, captioning and indexing, and the ability to integrate with enterprise systems, Matterhorn 1.0 will provide an video management system that simply accomplishes all relevant functionality related to the production, the management and the distribution of lecture recording.

2. Scale up

The majority of institutions we talked to have a productive podcasting program already - but are less efficient than they would like it to be, and poorly situated to scale in response to the growing demand for lecture recordings and handling of media objects for the future. Instead of working with a variety of tools and programs to produce and distribute content, Matterhorn will offer all relevant functionalities as a integrated whole. This reduces the amount of manual work needed to shepherd media objects across various sub-systems, thus increasing productivity and reliability.

3. Increase Impact

Matterhorn will provide the community with a rich media platform for educational research, both technological and pedagogical. Upon this platform, a richer, more engaging student experience is within reach. More students can be reach in more ways, through strategies such as plugging into the right learning context (e.g. LMS), increasing interaction with the media, supporting learning strategies, and enabling universal access and improved discoverability.

4. Standards

To make Matterhorn services re-usable within and beyond Matterhorn, standards were followed whereever possible. Dublin Core and MPEG-7 metadata together with OAI-PMH are a good example of how we try to assure Matterhorn can communicate with other systems, thus increasing the likelyhood of services being integrable to other services and systems.