In many universities, the audiovisual sector is placed under IT units. From your point of view what are the advantages? What are the disadvantages?

Dr. Joe Peters: After some years of seeing AV-IT as a divide, I have come to see this as a confluence. It is quite clear, that IT in education is built on a text-based platform over which video - including Flash and conferencing protocols, animation, graphics, and other paraphernalia - are added and transported as in streaming, or ingested as in all the rich presentation and web-based tools. More importantly, all of this collateral can be held, organised, and made to grow in server configurations at relatively low cost.

This cannot be done on an AV platform where producers spend many years in training and production companies produce products at some expense. Seen as a divide, AV and IT has many times been referred to as apples and oranges - having to co-exist in the same basket. The bottom line is that many streams of work occur, all of them using facets of both, AV and IT. For example, the experience at NUS has seen separate usage of AV for webcasts, conferencing, and video production.

This means duplication and higher costs. More importantly, there is a higher chance of the core professionals in both IT and AV being misrepresented because non-traditional usage patterns appear. But these are unnecessary occupational hurdles. The priority at all internationally acclaimed universities is to place IT strategically as a key infrastructure within pedagogy. This means it is up to AV to bridge this gap.

After all, for those who know, AV has a very sophisticated IT infrastructure - seen from the broadcasting and media sectors. That's why I believe the best thing to do is to stop treating AV and IT as a divide and to start looking for confluences. The advantages of this are many, provided the perception of the confluence is the same from both players.

The disadvantage likes mainly in opportunities lost, and these come because professionals hold rigid views about technology application. So the AV and IT professionals have to sort out their common trajectory before the professors and the administrations can even begin to understand how to fit the broader needs of pedagogy into the technical infrastructure.

What are major implications for pedagogy?

Dr. Joe Peters: There is no argument that if AV and IT professionals can get AV capture systems sorted out, it will have a dramatic effect on the use of merged technologies like computing, AV and communications in core pedagogy. The use of technology is not driven from the academic side. There must be a good reason why technology is not fully exploited in fundamental ways by the academic community.

So, if the AV-IT confluence is studied and worked on, and there are suitable solutions to enable quality, that would be the best bet for the third link in the chain, the professors, to close the gap, and make educational technology a totally functional component of tertiary-level pedagogy.

What implications do you see for facility design?

Dr. Joe Peters: As universities move towards serious content creation and dissemination on AV-based platforms using IT infrastructures, the basic rules of capture like line-of-sight, room acoustics, and AV pathways that relate to headroom calculation for facility designs and more will have to be considered at the initial stages of planning.

These AV fundamentals have never been considered in facility design, as AV only comes into facility design at the tender stage. So much backtracking occurs when the facility has to be made AV-IT compliant. This is too new a subject to be given cursory treatment, even in an interview like this. The implications are immense.

Could you give us some insights for solutions based on experiences at the National University of Singapore?

Dr. Joe Peters: The AV side has done two initiatives. The first was to craft a product-value measure and build a simulator, and now we are in the process of educating the University community about processes and good evaluation of AV products. We call this the AV Assessment Index. We have also developed an AV Primer to guide discussion and analysis of AV applications within teaching and learning rooms and auditoriums.



How would you describe the value of videos for eLearning?

Dr. Joe Peters: If we begin to think of video as documentation, then we can go beyond just commonly understood video products, to video book, video dissertations, and even comprehensive studios and laboratories where documentation is part of core processes. Video is a TIMELINE activity, just like teaching.

One of the problems in the ingestion methodology has been to document blackboard and/or Power Point annotations. The prime reason for this is the fact that IT, as I said earlier, is text based - which will always have the inherent problem of capturing on the timeline. The video platform should solve this problem.