Televising Classes - Part 2

We have been looking at the issue raised by some students as to whether courses at UC and UCLA could be in some kind of hybrid format, i.e., online and in-person at the same time. And we have been noting the difficulty involved in implementing such a demand (including intellectual property concerns raised by the Academic Senate).* But one of the difficulties is just the technology needed. Every classroom would have to have at least a camera in the back of the room and appropriate audio equipment. 

Our most recent post noted that the Anderson School of Management has installed the camera-in-the-back-of-the-room type of technology through a company called Mediasite which allows live-streaming and/or recording for distribution later. The camera goes on automatically when a class is scheduled. Alas, even with such an installation, problems have occurred.

From a recent email to Anderson faculty: As many of you are aware, we have been experiencing a lot of random livestream glitches with our Mediasite recorders, recently. Unfortunately, those glitches have also affected some of our upload speeds and have increased the time it takes for some recordings to encode on the Sonicfoundry cloud server.  We have been prioritizing trouble-shooting these issues with a Cisco engineer and our different campus partners to pinpoint the issue. 

While the issue has not entirely been resolved, we now have a working theory to solve this issue as soon as possible (and have confirmed the issue is not on the UCLA/Anderson network). With that in mind, if you need a course livestreamed, please use Zoom in the classroom you will be teaching in...

In short, there are bound to be added complications for faculty with the hybrid approach, even apart from the intellectual property concerns. And, as the Anderson experience suggests, there are costs in maintenance of the equipment entailed. Perhaps it's best to let experimentation go on in a few venues until the technology is ready for prime time.

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/03/televising-classes.html; http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/03/watch-regents-morning-meetings-of-march.html.