User Story from The University of Salford
Founded in 1896, The University of Salford has a reputation for real-world teaching and ground-breaking research and is regarded as one of the UK's most enterprising universities.
Streaming media has been implemented as a project of the Learning Technologies Centre (LTC) at the University of Salford. Andrew has assumed lead responsibility for the development and implementation of the system and, as part of a team, provides support for both staff and student users.
Andrew told us that Planet PC had specified and provided the hardware for the initial implementation of streaming media within the LTC, which proved to be reliable and very successful. As the needs and interests progressed the LTC invested in the further development of the system and chose to implement Planet eStream to satisfy the ongoing needs of their users.
Andrew informed us that the implementation of Planet eStream was funded by a university grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Planet eStream will be used by academic colleagues to record, live stream and archive lectures for the use of students off campus. The streams will be delivered through Blackboard, the university Virtual Learning Environment.
We asked Andrew to outline the main benefits of Planet eStream:
"Whilst there are interesting pedagogic issues we wish to explore as part of this development e.g. does steaming affect the classroom dynamic, we envisage the main benefits to be:
- Increasing access to valuable academic resources particularly in the discipline of Criminology
- Promoting increased flexibility in curriculum delivery
- The use of 'chapter points' to enable multiple accesses to single pieces of media."
Andrew added that Planet eStream adds functionality to the existing implementation including the synchronisation of PowerPoint slides with video and the ability to easily search and retrieve media from the Planet eStream database.
In conclusion Andrew stated:
"The potential for streaming media in higher education is immense and we are starting to explore some of the potential for ourselves. However, given the limited expertise and resources that we have available to us within the sector, we are always dependent upon the advice and support of suppliers to enable us to move forward quickly and appropriately. We believe that Planet PC have technical solutions appropriate to our need and predicted use and, perhaps more importantly, a genuine desire to assist us in exploring how we might use those solutions to exploit the potential of streaming media in teaching and learning."
Andrew Stevenson
Learning Technologist
The University of Salford