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Using Web-based Services for Finding and Hosting Videos for Academic Purposes

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This advice document provides an overview of the research carried out for our advice documents: Using Web-based Services for Hosting Videos and Finding Videos for Academic Purposes Using Web-based Video Hosting Sites.

Overview

The benefits of using video material in education have been well established over the past few years and include:

The need to address different learning styles
Demonstrating practical activities not possible in a particular classroom
Reaching geographically remote students
Attention grabbing activity
Furthering an institution's strategic objectives for research and business and community engagement (BCE).

The brief of this research was to critically assess the potential of four web-based services (Odeo, GoogleVideo, YouTube and Vimeo), and to potentially identify similar, newer services for:

Hosting education multimedia content - see our advice document Using Web-based Services for Hosting Videos.
For teachers, lecturers and students to use these as places to find content to support their own academic work and their institution's strategic objectives for research and business and community engagement (BCE) - see our advice document Finding Videos for Academic Purposes Using Web-based Video Hosting Sites.

To take account of different speeds of access to the internet generally, tests were conducted in a home environment (wireless 54Mb connection to 2Mb broadband connection) and a university student computer lab environment (100Mb wired connection to 10Mb broadband connection) although no significant difference in access times was noted.

All testing was conducted using Internet Explorer 6.

Many of these sites include facilities similar to those on social networking sites, including the ability to communicate directly with other members via electronic mail, or indirectly by leaving comments on videos and starting or contributing to discussion threads. Such facilities, properly used, could have clear potential for establishing, and maintaining, contacts beyond the institution and therefore engaging both business and community locally or indeed further afield where a common interest can be established. These specific facilities were not tested to any great extent as they were considered beyond the brief of the research, although reference is made to these facilities at times where they could be identified as having clear relevance to teaching and learning or business and community engagement activities.

As at early October 2009, there are over 300 sites which offer access to videos stored on their sites or act as a directory for videos freely available on the internet. Of these, many also offer hosting capabilities. Given the sheer number of sites, and the time-scale of the research, none of these were investigated beyond the initially identified four, as any results would have been extremely random. The only exception to this was iTunes, as this can be identified as becoming a major force in the hosting of both audio and video material by educational establishments.

There is a brief overview of features of other sites available on ReelSEO, although the inclusion of this link does not imply any recommendation or guarantee of its accuracy.

For the full findings of our research, please see Using Web-based Services for Hosting Videos and Finding Videos for Academic Purposes Using Web-based Video Hosting Sites.

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