How to set up Online Classes?

Dingdongbubble

Hi

I want to know how one can set up live online classes. Like in those university distance learning program. I want to be able to stream my video via a webcam and deliver good quality voice as well to upto 50 people at once live. So is this possible? Or is it just better to use a basic DV cam and record myself and compress the video and upload it to a server form where folk can just download it and watch it at their own pace?

royal

Camtasia Studio - $299. Same thing CBTNuggets use but using a different video option (not live streaming).
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

dynamik

Live broadcasting to 50 people is going to be complex and expensive, but it is possible.

If you're doing this yourself, you would be better off uploading the videos to youtube or someone and let them foot the bandwidth bill.

Daniel333

Dingdongbubble,

50 is a lot, I think this does 15 people .
http://www.connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=94

I generate training videos for my job, I either use Adobe Captivate or http://camstudio.org/. Adobe is nice because you can make "follow along" style videos and add questions. Camstudio is great for just straight video, plus it's free!

royal

You could also try Microsoft LiveMeeting. It's what they use for doing Live Webcasts. I can't even imagine how huge their connectivity pipe is for this. Their services can offer up to 1250 particpants. Video and Audio takes up quite a bit of bandwidth. To do this for up to 1250 participants and having many customers is just amazing. Of course most customers will only have around 25-50 people at any given time.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/livemeeting/default.aspx

hetty

Unless you want to protect it via DRM, I think YouTube or something similar is the way to go. You'll get more viewers after any scheduled netcast and it's cheap bandwidth. Checkout Windows Media Services in Server 2000 or 2003 that would definitely do the job. It can also multicast which uses less bandwidth.

hypnotoad

There are a number of services known as "Content Distribution Networks" that do this either live or recorded. Fees vary greatly depending on the number of users, encoding rate, etc.

The 3 big ones:
- Internap
- Akaimai
- Limelight

dynamik

nl wrote:

There are a number of services known as "Content Distribution Networks" that do this either live or recorded. Fees vary greatly depending on the number of users, encoding rate, etc.

The 3 big ones:
- Internap
- Akaimai
- Limelight

No CacheFly?

hypnotoad

UpstreamNetworks is my personal favorite...

Dingdongbubble

thanks for the replies. Well 50 people was an estimate for a situation when it gets popular. A more realistic number would be 10 people. I guess its better to make videos and then upload them t youtube.

hetty

All I would say is, look at how funny & popular the You Suck At Photoshop videos are on YouTube. If you got real traffic you could maybe turn that in to something that puts money in your pocket.

JDMurray

It's very difficult to get even 15 people together for a live Webcast, especially if they are in different timezones. Think about ways to structure your courses so they are a "learn at your own pace" style. I really like the idea of presenting classes as 10-minutes videos uploaded to a service like YouTube. You get free hosting, distribution, and advertising that way.

Once your classes are a success, you can work on creating a professional Web site to host your Distance Learning material from the free projects at sourceforge.net. Search on the terms education, online, classroom, and conferencing to find many such projects. It looks like The Manhattan Virtual Classroom is currently the most popular online classroom project.

dynamik

hetty wrote:

All I would say is, look at how funny & popular the You Suck At Photoshop videos are on YouTube. If you got real traffic you could maybe turn that in to something that puts money in your pocket.

Off topic, but if you watch them at www.mydamnchannel.com the quality is much better. I encourage anyone who wants some funny nsfw photoshop instruction to check them out.

hetty

dynamik wrote:

if you watch them at www.mydamnchannel.com the quality is much better

You can add &fmt=18 to the end of the YouTube URL to bump up the resolution of the video from 320x240 to 480x360, up the audio sample rate from 22.05Hz to 44.1Hz and it converts it to MP4 which means you can copy the video straight from your internet cache to your iPod Touch without converting it. You need to rename the .htm file to .mp4 and its usually the biggest file in there.

The size of the original You Suck At Photoshop #2 is 8.12Mb but the MP4 version is 17.3Mb and I was able to copy it straight to my iPod Touch.

dynamik

Nice tips. Thanks.

JDMurray

hetty wrote:

you can copy the video straight from your internet cache to your iPod Touch without converting it.

Oh nice! The podcasts are yelling about the iPod and Mac only supporting QuickTime and not the Flash-based video formats, and here YouTube has an easy (yet secretive) work-around. Do Revver and MetaCafe have a URL-tweak MP4 conversion feature too?

hetty

JDMurray wrote:

Do Revver and MetaCafe have a URL-tweak MP4 conversion feature too?

Not that I know of, I heard YouTube is trailing the tweak and might make a site-wide change. That might prompt the others to do something similar.

dynamik

I've occasionally seen a "Watch this video in high-quality" link under the video. It must be something they're just testing out. It looks like your method works consistently though.

Darthn3ss

if you want live and 50 people, ujst get a stickam account