The traditional universities are entering the online world and are doing all at once. So suddenly the problem with that is that university managers have no tools to carry out certain demands.
Fortunately from time to time an open source development appears to facilitate the task. The Free Software is superbly suited to the needs of universities and is partly the reason for the success of products such as Moodle and Sakai.

The latest fashion is to record and upload lessons. The service is highly valued by students. As a result they can review the lesson once at home.

Record and distribute lessons is a process that requires large amounts of resources, both human and technical. Until now we did not know any development that would facilitate the task. Educational Technology Services of UC Berkeley has been working in this subject for a long time and just now has decided to open its Opencast project to other institutions. For this purpose the former July 10th ETS Berkeley held a meeting in Oxford with its European partners. We were very kindly invited to attend.

Opencast is a product developed over Apple’s Podcast Producer. It involves software and hardware and it allows to record lessons and the deliver them through different channels like YouTube and u-iTunes.
ETH Zurich has developed a similar product named Replay. At Oxford (pictures) we talk about how to organize the project and what to do in order to share developments, many of them already working. We all agree that we should have a common APIs.

The traditional universities would do well to follow the project if they want to record lessons and they need a product to automatize the task. Our interest is in using video, for example recordings of our
teachers, as teaching material. That is why our cooperation is based on transforming the recordings in full multimedia content as well as those contained in packaging formats IMS - Common Cartridge.