by Gary Karlsen
The Magic Lantern Group

ICT is fostering the development of a changing culture in education. A new permissiveness in educational methodologies made possible by new digital tools is changing the ways in which educational video is being used. Hitherto unavailable video clips are now becoming accessible as new learning objects for educators. This paper briefly describes a change in the status quo for educational video and suggests new applications for distance and distributed learning.

How often have producers or their representatives closed the door on teachers or course designers seeking permission to edit a program because they only wanted a small part of it for a lesson or unit of study? From dawn to dusk there has been a conflict on this subject between the producers, the distributors and the users of educational film and video. Educational technology distributors and teachers alike have been frustrated by the inflexibility of audio-visual program producers who generally reject requests for re-editing programs or segmenting them for portioned usage. The costs of extracting and utilizing video clips are so prohibitive, or the conditions of use so restrictive for educators, that program clips are a non-option for them.

With all due respect to the concerns of producers, there are several reasons for their inflexibility on this matter. Here are a few of them:

• The producer does not want his or her work broken up and used out of context. The intended message or creative elements may be misrepresented.

• Costs are high because it is usually very expensive to retrieve, extract and re-package archived masters.

• Stock shots are a special source of revenue and are sold in a high-priced marketplace for very specific, often one – time use contracts. There is seldom a lower tiered price for education.

• Some producers are simply unable to provide clips of their own programs. Contracts with talent and trade unions rarely allow excerpting.

Why doesn't the teacher merely play or assign viewing of only the portion of the program that is desired? There are no legal issues that prevent the viewing of any segment of a program at any time. In the (old) days of film in schools, there was no easy way to do this. Film projectors were unfriendly and sprockets were unyielding. The technology of VCRs has helped in this with the ability to easily preview a videotape and find locations relatively quickly by using fast forward, cue and review, 4 head display, and so on. However, this linear technology is still inefficient for the teacher who wants to integrate very specific clips into the lesson plan, or for the student who must take the time to search for the right part of the tape.

Why show only selected clips anyway, especially if the program was created specifically as a treatment of the subject matter? And after all, wasn't the video program purchased and selected for its relevancy to the curriculum? Media literate teachers are those who will employ a video resource as a teaching tool for active learning with pre and post-viewing activities. They will also want to use a video program for the most important things it has to offer them and their students. The entire program is often not germane to the topic or concept to be learned. Like many other resources, only elements may be needed to define, describe, visualize, demonstrate, or facilitate understanding.

At the macro level of curriculum development, complete works such as textbooks, readers, sound recordings, graphic, multimedia or other commercially available products may be prescribed or recommended. At the instructional design and micro levels of teaching, only parts of these media will be useful. Library collections, for example, are not meant to be consumed in their entirety. The holdings are there to support research. We go to the library to find the information we are looking for – information that is provided in different ways and with different points of view. Why then with video, should we be imposing entire programs on teachers and students? Teachers and learners want to be able to efficiently browse, select, and experience the program elements that they need for the task at hand.

Reflecting now on the opening question that asks why access to individual elements of a video program has been universally denied to educators, my answer would be: for technological, legal, and cultural reasons. Up to now, there has been no enabling mechanism for access to video clips while ensuring the protection of a producer's intellectual knowledge; available technologies have mitigated against efficient and effective access to program clips; and a culture of compliance and acceptance of the status quo has prevailed. But now, in our new media society where information and communications technologies (ICT) are commonplace in the majority of our classrooms, with or without walls, and in many of our homes, access to video and other learning objects¹ is becoming available. Digital technologies are enabling technologies. They are transforming everything we do with information media. They are bringing about changes in legislation and policies; and digital technologies are causing us to challenge traditional practices and institutionalized behaviours.

Digital technologies are having an extraordinary impact on distance education. Online delivery is rapidly becoming the norm for distance and distributed learning. Information, now available as data that can be easily manipulated, allows for a wide variety of presentation formats, teaching and learning styles, resource integration, assets cataloguing and student pacing. New opportunities for resource-rich, learner-centred environments offer the promise of more efficient and effective instruction. "By breaking down educational materials into their instructional components, and defining them as competencies, outcomes, and other instructional elements, we are able to reconstitute them into robust customized learning assets for use by individual learners and groups."²

Video is one of these structural components and video programs can now be broken down into consumable objects. With digital rights in place and the appropriate technology in hand, we can create and use clips while satisfying the producer and his or her agents that program integrity and creative rights are protected. One such technology is VideoBase^TM, a virtual editor that allows the user to tag or bookmark portions of a digital video program; title, annotate and index the clip segments; and save the results as a metafile for future use.³ The full program remains intact and is always available for viewing in its entirety. The "pointers" to the video clip information are contained within the small metafile. With a tool like VideoBase^TM the instructional designer can integrate video objects with other resources for a complete unit of study or an entire course.

VideoBase^TM supports video files in the MPEG1 format, a file type with the full screen, full motion (FSSM) quality that we are used to with VHS. Here is a scenario for incorporating video objects into an online course:

1. Purchase digital video rights for selected titles. The license should cover usage for the life of the course.

2. Index each video program using the VideoBase^TM editor utility. Any number of clips may be created and labeled. The metafiles can be saved and stored locally and can be modified or updated at any time with the editor.

3. If available bandwidth supports FSFM video streaming, then the programs and may be mounted on a video server for online access. The metafile indexes are integrated with the rest of the course and added to the web server.

4. Alternatively, CDs of the programs may be distributed to students, with the metafiles available online as hotlinks. A click opens the indexed video program and video objects are played from the student's CD-ROM drive.

1     See http://www.imsproject.org for a broader discussion on learning objects.

2     Porter, David, et al, On-demand Learning Infrastructure, Design & Management, "Institutional Research Plan", Open Learning Agency, in unpublished application to Canadian Foundation for Innovation, March, 1999.

3     For a more detailed discussion of VideoBase^TM, see  Karlsen, Gary, Full-Screen Full-Motion Video for Web-based Courses: A Hybrid Solution at http://www.magiclantern.ca/digvideoindex.htm , October, 1999. 

4     For information on some proprietary VoD interfaces and their video clip utilities see:

• Callisto Media Media Systems'  Voyager at http://www.callisto.ca/html/default_voyager.html

• SGI's MediaBase at http://www.sgi.com/software/mediabase/faq.html

• IBM's VideoCharger at http://www.software.ibm.com/data/videocharger