Opencast

Over the last few years, web lectures and podcasts have become an integral part of universities’ e-learning portfolios. They can be created by simply recording a lecture that is part of a curriculum anyway. Thus, the amount of recordings and media files to which the recordings are exported is constantly growing. More and more students as well as learners from outside the universities ask for lectures to be available online. Lecturers develop new didactic concepts and produce podcasts including additional material while students produce audio-visual content as user-generated e-learning objects.

Web 2.0 platforms and mashup websites, social networks and video Internet repositories like YouTube try to attract students to spend their time online. Apple´s iTunes U project  is also a popular place to reach learners all over the planet. For universities, it is not easy to decide whether this kind of popular websites and systems are an adequate place to include or present high-quality learning content. Platforms like Apple’s iTunes U or YouTube education are a good marketing place for universities to attract prospective students, partners for projects or for the university itself. For many universities producing open educational ressources is a challenging process and presently disputed. Besides legal grounds concerning copyright issues and further points, there are concerns on the lecturers’ side about the way their content will be used outside. It is often quite unclear which benefit can be found in open educational ressources.

This year’s Podcast University:2009 conference will offer different panels for the topics capturing in lecture rooms, web lectures and the rise of podcasting in recent years, didactic solutions for the successful application of podcasting in universities and concepts for using web 2.0 technologies for teaching and collaboration. General concepts for integrating podcasts in your field of activity are more appreciated than field reports about a single podcast experience.

Topics of Interest

Covered issues will include :

• Institutional audio-visual initiatives
• Web lectures and podcasting
• Adding pedagogical value to assets
• Open Educational Ressources
• Mobile learning
• Sustainable infrastructure and processes
• The OpenCast project
• Exchange formats / metadata
• Media distribution channels
•  …

Opportunities to Participate

• Paper sessions (20 minutes of presentation followed by a panel discussion).
• Run a workshop or tutorial. Proposals should clearly indicate the topic, background, knowledge expected of the participants, objectives, and the qualifications of the instructor.
• Organize a thematic session.

Besides we will also offer different Opencastproject <-> Matterhorn “Beginners workshops” for developers and interested persons the second day that want to get involved in the Opencastproject (info: http://www.opencastproject.org).

To apply write an abstract that should not exceed one page and mail it to kontakt@podcast-university.com till 25. June 2009