Page 10 - Campus Technology, March/April 2018

AV SMARTS
Princeton had to figure out who was going to produce those videos for the Coursera platform. The Broadcast Center was brought into the university’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and charged with creating a couple of pilot MOOCs. Those turned out to be a success, with some programs garnering registration in the tens of thousands — and demand grew for the creation of additional MOOCs. Eventually, Princeton took its MOOC programming to additional platforms, including edX, NovoEd and Kadenze, a couple of which were so new, the Broadcast Center staff needed to handle bug fixes and other support issues.
“The challenge was that we didn’t have a large group of full-time employees to support the MOOCs and then also support our normal activities,” said Hopkins. The answer: make MOOCs the Broadcast Center’s priority and outsource the rest. After all, that was what the center already did whenever there was too much work for its tiny crew to handle — hire local production companies and videographers to pick up the slack.
But that approach only worked as long as cost wasn’t a concern and the university could tolerate the uneven production quality of working with non-campus companies. Once the Office of the Dean of the College realized just how much was being invested (and what was being lost) by not using internal services to create videos, the need for change was clear.
Some two years after MOOCs became the main job of the Broadcast Center, the university renewed its focus on services for Princeton students. As the thinking went, while it’s wonderful for thousands of people from outside the university to experience what it’s like to learn from a Princeton professor, “the students should be the main priority for online course development,” noted Hopkins.
Concurrently, hybrid and flipped courses were surfacing at the institution. Taken together, those two changes in priority made it a “good time for us to really concentrate on internal production that we needed to have happen, benefiting the students first,” he said.
Organizational Rework
In order to provide more focused services for the internal needs of faculty and campus partners, OIT created a newly organized Instructional Support Services (ISS) division in 2015, eventually led by Associate Director Richard Bakken. That organization was charged with all kinds of responsibilities, including overall faculty technical support in learning spaces, along with AV event support, cluster computing and printing.
At the same time, the Broadcast Center was moved out from under the McGraw Center and turned into a Video Production
Support group within Bakken’s new division. However, MOOCs stayed within the realm of McGraw as the Online Learning Environments group, which meant McGraw needed help creating videos too. Left without its own facility, McGraw began planning for its own studio to handle that MOOC work as well as teaching and learning recording projects.
But, as Hopkins pointed out, “Here we already had a multi- million-dollar studio in place. And it didn’t make sense to outfit a building to [duplicate] the requirements for audio and control and all those efforts that go into making a quality studio.”
ISS suggested sharing the studio already in place. Using
When the studio is used for a Google Hangout, audio for each in-studio participant is recorded separately for later editing.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2018