# Open Education Videos around the world: The Making Of


**Background**

During the presentation on [Open Education around the
world](http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/03/12/links-from-the-talk-open-education-around-the-world/)
at OISE last week, I wanted to really highlight to people the incredible
array of resources available, in many different languages. I also
discussed three different purposes of openness, direct use (by target
audience, usually students), reuse (ie. recontextualized by a teacher or
other intermediary before it reaches the target audience) and
transparency (open the windows and let people look in - heavily
influenced by [Mike
Caulfield](http://mikecaulfield.com/2009/01/25/openness-as-reuse-and-openness-as-transparency/)).
Thus, I blazed through something like [105
slides](http://www.slideshare.net/houshuang/open-education-around-the-world),
much of it screenshots from OERs in different languages and contexts.

I've in the past wanted to show snippets of video lectures when giving
presentations, but never been able to. Although I realize that video
lectures are far from the pedagogical (or andragogical) apex, there is
something very fascinating about being able to watch a lecture at MIT,
or at a Chinese university, that cannot be replaced by a boring looking
text, especially from the transparency perspective. However, where I was
presenting, I could not trust that the internet would be fast enough,
often there were introductory segments that I needed to skip, I just
wanted to show little snippets, and I thought it would just become too
much of a disruption of the presentation.

For this presentation, I had more time than usual (2 hours is incredibly
generous, yet we were still pressed for time, and would have liked more
for the Q&A), and more than ever I wanted to impress on the audience the
incredibly idea that we could look through the virtual windows of
classrooms all around the world. Instead of trying to preload a bunch of
clips, and play snippets of them, I decided to try to edit together a
quick video showcasing a few seconds from lectures in as many languages
as possible. Of course, I decided this around 11PM on the night before
the presentation, which didn't leave me much sleep in the end, for a
10AM presentation.

**The process**

It turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had
thought. I decided to use iMovie, since it was preinstalled on my Mac,
and I didn't need any kind of advanced editing, just splicing together
and perhaps adding some text. First, I had to find the source material
of course. MIT was easy, they offer the videos for download, and they
provide a license that allows this to happen. In addition, for
English-language content, there are sites that collect video lectures,
such as [videolectures.net](http://videolectures.net/), or even iTunes,
so it wouldn't have been hard to find good content outside of MIT. As it
was, I wasn't trying to showcase the rich world of English-language
lectures, so I settled for some clips of MIT's most downloaded course on
physics
([8.01](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01Physics-IFall1999/CourseHome/index.htm)).

I knew that both [Indira Gandhi National Open
University](http://www.ignou.ac.in/) (IGNOU, which I have [written about
before](/blog/2008/12/05/worlds-largest-university-opens-almost-all-its-materials/))
and the IITs
([likewise](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/04/06/opencourseware-around-the-world-china-and-india/))
had published great videos on Youtube. In addition, IGNOU also provided
some lectures in Hindi, so that I could provide both Hindi and English
lectures. Given that these were on Youtube, I was able to grab the Flash
videos and convert them to a format that iMovie would read using
[Handbrake](http://handbrake.fr/).

Next, for the Chinese courses. This is what I've done the most research
on (see [my previous
presentation](http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/02/12/presentation-on-opencourseware-in-china-posted-to-slideshare/))
and I knew that most of their courses had video components, however
these were often streamed and in RealMedia. For some reason, the
[Internet Archive](http://www.archive.org) has a [large collection of
older
courses](http://www.archive.org/browse.php?field=subject&mediatype=education&collection=chinese_u_lectures),
and here I was able to find one that was in WMV format, and once again
convert it to a format legible by iMovie. I found one in Chinese, and a
rare one in English (most Chinese university courses are taught in
Chinese, but they are beginning to experiment with some English courses
to increase the English level of their graduates).

This was the easy part, but I wanted more. Through [Lee
Haishuo](http://www.haishuolee.com/), I found out about
[Castalia](http://www.castalia.jp/top), which features Japanese
lectures. I also found some video lectures through Instituto Tecnologico
de Monterey, however these were only available in streaming format. I
spent a long time searching for how to download the stream, how to
convert from RealMedia to iMovie, etc, and finally I came across a
simpler solution. I used [SnapZ
Pro](www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/) to do a "screencast" of
the area of the screen where the movie was streaming, and then imported
the resulting QuickTime file into iMovie. Worked perfectly, but the
videos were already quite low quality - not sure how well it would work
with higher resolution video.

So, I managed to get it all into iMovie, and then it was easy. Choose a
few sections, put on some titles, export it to QuickTime, embed it into
the PowerPoint slides, and of course, put it on YouTube. The result was
2,5 minutes long, visits five countries and five languages, and can be
seen here:

**Lessons learnt**

It's kind of ironic, in a talk about Open Education
and the ideas of remix, etc, how difficult it was to do this. The first
part is finding the material. I wanted a snippet from a Korean lecture,
and I know there are Korean video lectures out there. I would go to the
[OpenCourseWare Consortium](http://www.ocwconsortium.org/) site, and get
a list of Korean universities (as an aside, I wish all these links went
to the OCW page of the institution, not the mainpage - sometimes I would
arrive at the mainpage of an institution, search for OCW, and not find
anything there). I would visit each university's OCW collection, choose
a faculty, choose a course, and say "oh, this course doesn't have any
video lectures"... Start again. Not very efficient. Why can't I search
for Korean courses that have video lectures about economics, or courses
in English, German or Italian (I speak all three) that have exam
questions? (I know this is being worked on, and is partly dependent on
how much metadata is generated by the sites, etc).

When I had found a file, it was often very hard to reuse it. Streaming
video is not easy to reuse, or even just to save offline for
distribution to people who don't have internet access etc. An additional
problem is that several of these resources didn't actually use open
licenses - especially for the Indian and Chinese projects. It's there,
but you don't have an explicit license to use it. Some Chinese educators
I have spoken with make the point that they haven't used an open
license, because they don't see copyright as a problem, not because they
don't want people to copy it. But if I am at University of Toronto, and
want to translate one of these videos and use it in my classes, the
institution might not let me.

Ideally, what I'd like to see happen more is for institutions to not
insist so much on hosting everything on their own site, but to share it
using existing Web 2.0 platforms. Although the license is still a
problem, it was easy for me to find videos for the Indian projects,
because they are on YouTube. Just like the Library of Congress [posting
photos on
flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/)enables people
to tag, link to, embed, etc - having video on Youtube (or somewhere else
- it doesn't even have to be a commercial service, it could be
archive.org), would make reuse and findability a lot easier. Put your
pictures on flickr, your slides on SlideShare, your curricula on
WikiEducator, etc. But of course, part of the way OCW in particular is
financed, or "sold" to the institutions, is that it will be a strong
tool for branding and marketing, so institutions might be loth to give
up on the specialized sites that you have to visit. (I know this is
beginning to happen, with iTunes for example, but I'd like to see much
more).

I'd love to expand this video with more language examples, because I
think it would be a great fun thing to be able to include in future
talks about OCW, etc.

Stian