Public Group active 6 years ago

CUNY Central Server: A Discussion…

In responding to an inquiry from CIS, I am seeking to gather information for a CUNY Central hosted media server that would be available to all campuses. CIS has initiated the conversation at our monthly Steering Committee and Bb CAT meetings. Faculty input is critical. This is a great opportunity to help build the tool, share expertise, plan for policy, etc.
Looking for folks to join, looking for specifications, comments, suggestions, warnings, etc.

Admins:

  • CUNY Tube?

    Posted by Stephen Powers on October 16, 2014 at 9:58 pm

    CUNY Tube might be overly ambitious, but the idea would be that CIS would host a CUNY server for faculty use that would house digital media. There is a lot to discuss.
    – needed hardware
    – operating software
    – policies and procedures
    – intellectual property
    – access (approval policy)
    There were more items brought up at the Bb Steering Committee as well as at the Bb CAT meeting, but this is a beginning. Faculty input is greatly desired. Please post comments, ask questions, etc.

3 replies
    • Bruce Naples
      Participant
      November 17, 2014 at 1:22 pm

      At Queensborough we have a media server that some faculty are reluctant to use because they cannot get the “instant gratification” of uploading videos and then receiving an immediate URL and / or embed code (like YouTube). Users must deliver video files to us, we place them on the server and then email the URL to them – this may take up to a few days. That said, our media server is currently hosting over 66,000 faculty-use files taking 500 GB of space. In addition the college has 3,459 full length videos taking 1TB of space. Other faculty have opted to create their own YouTube Channel and host their media there, and still others are using other media hosting services such as Vimeo. We of course have no control or analytics for this.

      There are a number of services that are already experts at providing necessary features. In my opinion we should negotiate and contract with one of them. Needed features in a media hosting service include:
      1. Unlimited space
      2. Media streaming capability
      3. Support for uploading many different media formats
      4. Immediate system format conversion to HTML5 standards-based codecs in multiple resolutions
      5. Assignment of an immediate URL and embed code
      6. Available Video Captioning for ADA compliance
      7. One master account with sub-accounts
      8. Categorizing / Tagging
      9. Analytics – usage statistics
      10. Commenting with spam filtering, and rating capability
      11. Sharing / social media connectivity
      12. Privacy settings capability

    • Stephen Powers
      Participant
      November 17, 2014 at 1:45 pm

      Thank you Bruce.
      I lean towards a hosted environment as well; I think that provides the immediate gratification that you mention.

    • Bruce Naples
      Participant
      February 13, 2015 at 3:20 pm

      As the recent law-suit against Harvard and MIT demonstrates, one important feature of a CUNYtube should be the auto-addition of captions and transcripts for video and audio, and the “requirement” that uploaded images be tagged with alt-text to describe what the image depicts.

3 replies

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