Open educational resources are digitized materials that are offered freely online as teaching and learning resources to educators, researchers, students, and self-learners. The topic of open education resources, including why, where and how to distribute them, has become a hot theme of discussion and debate in education. Open education projects, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare, have ushered in an open educational resource movement.

Online audio and video have grown in popularity as open education resources. The maturation of online technologies, the growth of broadband connections, as well as the rapid growth of easy-to-use and Internet-capable portable media devices, have simplified online audio and video distribution. Access to online media is made easier by media distribution channels, which have become the preferred method for educational groups distributing open and public audio and video. Distribution channels, such as iTunes U and YouTube, are available at no cost to universities... Distribution channels, such as iTunes U and YouTube, are available at no cost to universities and academic institutions. Each of these channels is easy to manage, offers free media hosting resources, and provides a direct method to connect with international audiences.

Because of the convenience of media distribution channels, educators are using them to provide support for comprehensive open educational resource websites, for both internal course needs and for distance learning initiatives. Open access media resources are also typically made available under one of many types of Creative Commons licenses, granting access to share, re-purpose, and in some cases, remix the media files. This in turn, is allowing other educators and educational technologists to build tools that can add interactive features to the content, and extend the reach and accessibility of open educational resources.

From here forward is a survey of online environments that have developed into common models of utilizing open education resources and media distribution channels. These models have evolved to integrate educational video content with websites, mobile applications, and now, even television programming.

Course Archives and Repositories

In recent years, more instructors are choosing to record their lectures and distribute them not only to students enrolled in their courses but also to a public audience on the Internet. There is reliable evidence that student demand of multimedia resources have contributed to the growth of online lectures. But what else is motivating instructors to do this? One explanation can be found in this video where Richard Bulliet, professor of history at Columbia University, who at CCNMTL's recent "New Media in Education" conference, spoke about his reasoning behind adopting an open access recording practice:

(This video will jump to the part where Prof. Bulliet speaks on archiving his lectures on YouTube.)

Over the course of two years, Columbia University has been adding videos of course lectures, public lecture events, and conferences to its YouTube channel. This includes all the lectures from Professor Bulliet's History of the World to 1500 CE, which were recorded with the assistance of his teaching assistant. Video recordings that are produced either by an instructor, a teaching assistant, or even groups of students are becoming more common practice in the classroom. It is a low-cost method of recording and distributing course lecture content that allows instructors and students to participate in the media production process. Many of these videos are also released through Columbia's iTunes U channel.

Following MIT's lead, Yale University began recording some of their core faculty's courses, publishing lecture recordings and related documents online under sharable licenses. The Open Yale Courses program offers free and open public access to select courses taught by some of Yale's most renowned professors. The staff behind this program have developed a comprehensive website that provides further details about the topics in each course, and serves as an informed archive of each media asset related to the course. This website is hosted on the Yale campus and is administered by Yale staff. However, Yale also offers a version of each course lecture recording in iTunes U and YouTube, which allows the recordings to reach an even wider audience outside of academia.

Harvard University went a similar route when they partnered with WGBH Boston and American Public Television to produce an online repository of recordings for Justice with Michael Sandel. Professor Sandel's course on the challenges of democracy and law in the modern age has become one of the most popular courses on the Harvard campus, with close to a thousand students enrolling in the course each time it has been offered. The Justice project opens up the enthralling lecture series to the world... The Justice project opens up the enthralling lecture series to the world, as each video lecture is hosted in full on YouTube. But the core of the project is a website developed by Harvard and their media partners, which contextualizes each video lecture with related readings, study guides, and an online discussion areas. Harvard students and the general public are welcome to contribute. Combined with the recordings, the Justice website becomes an open access online classroom. This lecture series is also available in podcast form on iTunes U.

Media distribution channels have also provide non-profit organizations and educators who work outside of universities with a solution for providing instructional videos to the masses, like Salman Khan of the Khan Academy. A multiple degree holder from MIT, Khan began creating screencast tutorials to help friends and family learn simple math and physics topics. Unlike the full-length lectures offered by Yale and Harvard, his instructional recordings are short, to the point, and are intended as quick assistance. Over the course of six years, he has turned his side project into a non-profit educational enterprise. He has now received funding from major investors and large companies, turning Khan Academy into a popular online resource for students at all grade levels and for lifelong learners.

Educational Media Portals

At Duke, media distribution channels exist for nearly every school and department associated with the university. There are seventy-seven unique YouTube channels that originate from the Duke campus, as well as eight iTunes U channels and a presence on UStream for live events. With so much open video content being published from many corners of the Duke campus, the technology team there started Duke On Demand, a portal that aggregates media from these channels into one, searchable website. Visitors can then either access media from this portal or subscribe to the various distribution channels via RSS. Duke's media portal is powered by Miro Community, an open source framework produced by the Participatory Culture Foundation that allows institutions and organizations to create their own media distribution channels using existing content.

Entrepreneurs have also seen the open educational resource area as ripe for growth and investment. The most prominent third party endeavor is Academic Earth, which collects full video lecture recordings from major universities into one portal with useful categories and ratings making these lectures easy to find through one location.

Multimedia Tool Widgets

With the wealth of open academic videos now available online, technology developers have been encouraged to create applications that add further interactivity to video content. Web applications can extend the relationship between media types, and fuse together new forms of open access resources. A good amount of innovative work is now happening with captions and transcripts that are associated with online videos. For example, the Universal Subtitles, again from Participatory Culture Foundation, has put together a software widget that allows anyone to subtitle any open access video in any language. The project aims for a "crowdsource" approach in making video more accessible to a worldwide audience and disabled viewers, which for educational video is a crucial consideration.

Apps for Mobile and Tablet Devices

Probably the most effective organization at bringing stand-out public lectures of good ideas to the world is TED. The TED website is the home to more than 700 TEDTalks, lectures from the world's foremost innovators, thinkers, scientists, and activists. TEDTalks contribute to an open dialogue of international issues that stretch across cultures. It has been a primary goal of the TED.com team that these videos easily reach the general public at no cost.

To reach an increasingly mobile and worldwide audience, TED offers a native applications for iOS and Android devices for an inclusive TED experience. Chris Anderson, the TED founder speaks to this topic in his visionary talk, "How Web Video Can Power Global Innovation."

YouTube and iTunes U are also accessible on mobile and tablet devices via web browsers and dedicated apps, however sometimes not all of the media content within these channels are compatible. In contrast, TED has made enhancements to their website so that each video can be viewed via their website on desktop PCs, smartphones, and tablet devices.

Universities are adapting to "app"-based delivery channels for course content. For example, MIT recently released an iOS application called LectureHall, which provides access to OpenCourseWare videos and related documents in a mobile-friendly form. LectureHall also has experimental features for taking notes and joining online discussions while on a mobile or tablet device.

The mobile Internet market is expected to become one of the primary means in which people worldwide access web content. Analysts of online technologies are expecting that it will be driven by improved smartphones and a wave of cutting-edge tablet devices as their growth will outpace the growth of the desktop and laptop markets combined, and online video has been named as a medium that is driving this area of innovation (See the Mobile Internet Report). It is not hard to imagine that soon the average college students will rely on "touch"-centric tablets over other types of computing hardware. It makes the importance of having educational content in a format that is accessible on mobile and tablet devices even more of an important goal for educators to strive for in the near future.

Television

The past six years have seen a explosion in the amount of video available to online. Besides free user generated video content, major television networks and movie studios have also begun to offer video content online to consumers. For many, Internet video is a growing preferred alternative to the content that is available on broadcast and cable television. It is no surprise, therefore, that many Internet video content providers are now experimenting with ways in bringing online video seamlessly onto household televisions. This includes the vast set of academic videos available on distribution channels like YouTube. Google recently announced a program that intends to investigate how Google TV, a new technology that integrates both broadcast and Internet content on television sets, can be used in the classroom. The program is called Google TV for EDU, which is being rolled out for research purposes by media faculty at select universities this spring.

Conclusion

While open educational video resources like the ones mentioned here have become popular representations of educational video today, there is still plenty of room for further innovation in this area. For instance, while distribution channels provide easy access to online educational video, how can the corresponding resource environments that offer tools where learners are granted greater ability to analyze these videos and produce academic or scholarly work? The future of how online educational video may be utilized may hold more promise using these models a reference point.

Full list of collections mentioned in this article:

Columbia University
iTunes U: https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browsev2/columbia.edu
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/columbiauniversity

Yale: Open Yale Courses
iTunes U: http://itunes.apple.com/us/institution/yale-university/id341649956
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/yalecourses

Harvard University: Justice with Michael Sandel
YouTube EDU: http://www.youtube.com/user/Harvard#grid/user/30C13C91CFFEFEA6
iTunes U: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=379064095

Khan Academy
iTunes U: http://itunes.apple.com/us/institution/khan-academy/id391034778
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy

Duke University
iTunes U: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/new.duke.edu
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Duke
OnDemand: http://duke.mirocommunity.org

TED
iOS App: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ted/id376183339?mt=8

MIT LectureHall
iOS App: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mit-opencourseware-lecturehall/id379390362?mt=8