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July 2009 Digital Rapids Delivers "A La Carte Education" in Dublin at Griffith College
www.gcd.ie
by Declan Goulding, Libirel Communications Ltd.
Originally published in TV Technology Europe
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Griffith College (www.gcd.ie) is Ireland’s largest independent third level institution. Situated on a seven-acre campus within a mile of St. Stephen’s Green on Dublin’s South Circular Road, it enjoys a strong national and a growing international reputation for student success. The College has gained an enviable reputation for providing students with first class lectures and excellent study material. Today there are over 8,000 students studying in the College. It offers both academic and professional programmes, full and part-time, short-term and long-term and from classroom to distance based.
Griffith College understand the importance of providing online access to lectures. They have created a new access to education at this level. The transition from the idea to the implementation was guided by Ronan Fenelon (College Director), John Molohan (IT Manager), Dr. Gavin McCullagh (Senior Systems Administrator) and Max Seligman who sourced Digital Rapids solutions through the local Digital Rapids representative, Declan Goulding of Libirel Communications (www.libirel.com).
 Griffith College Dublin is home to Ireland’s largest law school, incorporating the Undergraduate and Professional Law Schools. The pioneer offerings for online source material come from the lectures of this school. Max Seligman used the guidance of the Legal Video Forum in the United States, whose members include, Legal Videographers, Court Reporters, Attorneys and representatives of large corporations connected to the legal video field. Digital Rapids products were highly recommended. Max made the decision to use the Digital Rapids DRC-Stream cards, Stream software and expansion codecs as the tools to deliver the online content for Griffith College. He felt that the amount of people who were using DRC-Stream 500 was a fair indication of a good product. The Legal Video Forum associated Digital Rapids with reliability - legal work involves critical situations similar to that of a live broadcast. Other features in Digital Rapids product that Griffith has come to like are the ease of use, the live conversions, and the ability to preview both the video and the audio without additional hardware/software.
Max Seligman and his team encode the lectures to file on to the server system with a DVD copy recorded simultaneously. Griffith College are using On2 VP6 Flash Codec with MP3 Audio, supplied by Digital Rapids. Encoded material is available online 5 minutes after the first break of the lecture, the average file size for the half of the lecture is 230MB with a low quality 60MB copy available in tandem. Students access the online services by personally logging onto Griffiths’ Moodle site (Moodle is a Free Software Course Management System that educators can use to create effective online learning sites). This personal login imprints the users name on the video, a useful feature that can be used to combat possible piracy of the online material. The lecture halls are not equipped with microphones, so the lecturer repeats all questions from the students. This means the archive material has a full question and answer content. Two lecture halls in the Faculty of Law are now outputting their material to a student base with internet access and 3G access. This is as seismic a shift as you get in the world of education delivery.
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