Becoming An Online Media Mogul

The Internet makes learning more accessible and it connects learners together around the world, but it does so at a price. Limited bandwidth has severely restricted the media mix for e-learning and, as a result, limited what we can realistically achieve. Now, alongside ever-improving bandwidth availability, new streaming media technologies are making rich media a reality for more and more organisations. In this chapter, I dip a toe into the media stream to check how well it works and what it has to offer the e-learning community.

Keeping video in the picture

If you stick around long enough, it soon becomes evident that the relentless march of progress is actually taking us round in circles. Take the use of video in training. Once upon in time, we had video completely under control; we bought our John Cleese training film (and it really was on film in those days) from Video Arts, and we played it back to our trainees full-screen and at full frame rate, just like at the movies. It worked great in the graveyard shift after lunch, because the trainees could have a good laugh and we could take a quick nap. Then, in the early 80s, IBM launched the first PC and, ever since, we’ve been struggling to return to the glory days.

The first PCs had the processing power of the average washing machine, but they were good at text and, in the hands of a skilled designer, could host a highly interactive piece of training material. In time they could display reasonable graphics too, but if you really wanted to engage an audience, you needed sound and pictures. Solutions were quickly found, firstly by connecting VHS players to the PC (with the obvious handicap of slow random-access to individual scenes) and then, more successfully, through videodisc, the 12” analogue predecessor to the CD. Videodiscs could store 30 minutes of high-quality video per side or tens of thousands of stills. Once again we had video under control, the only problem being that a full kit (PC, interface card and videodisc player) cost about 5000.

About 1990, much cheaper solutions became available with the advent of CD-ROM. However, because CDs were designed for music and not data, bandwidth was set relatively low at about 170kbps (still more than three times better than a 56K modem working flat out) and so video had to be sacrificed. Only with the introduction of higher-speed CDs and really clever compression technologies such as MPEG did rich media reappear as an essential part of any technology-based training solution. Just in time for the Internet.

As we all know, for the majority of users, Internet bandwidth has been, and continues to be, a major problem. Although this hasn’t necessarily affected the scope for interactivity, when it comes to presenting information, our media choices have been constrained to good old text and graphics (and not too many of the latter, please). Once again – you guessed it – video has been sacrificed at the altar of technological progress.

But not for long. Ever resilient, video has made yet another comeback and now looks odds-on to make a return to a prominent position in the media mix. Streaming provides the means to once again get video under our control, which is just as well because, as Allen Ginsberg once said, whoever controls the media controls the culture.