Video Transcript Browsing Interface

CNN has presented a unique and powerful UI for viewing and navigating the video of one of the recent Presidential debates.  Aside from having done a great job presenting the transcript alongside the video (with appropriate click-to-play-from-here functionality), as well as a table-of-contents by topic; CNN has created a unique "map" of the debate, allowing a user to single out a moment, a particular speaker, or the restuls of a search by spoken word in a brillaint, graphical display.  

What's also intersting is the implementation:  a client-side Flash applet handles the whole thing by reading a single XML file that contains the entire contents of the debate in text form.  

It's one of the finest examples of this kind of thing that I've seen.  I'd love to know if anyone has thoughts about other situations in which this kind of interface could really add value.  The cost would be an issue - transcripts are expensive, as is massaging a transcript into the descriptive XML required for this tool.  Automation using tools like the Virage VideoLogger and Pictron's Audio Gateway can identify speakers and generate text from speech - the accuracy would certainly be far less than what CNN has done here, but for some purposes, would it be "good enough"?

The New RealPlayer 11 - A First Look

The new, "web-video-download-center" version of RealPlayer (Is RealPlayer Going to Make a Comeback?) is out this morning. [Download RealPlayer 11]  Some first impressions:

• Download: A 13MB download, but no questions asked and no prompting for personal info
• Installation: At about 80 seconds on my MacBook Pro (WinXP under Parallels), still not zippy, but it asked just a few simple questions about configuration on a single screen. Much simpler than prior versions.
• Loading: Loads up quickly - much more quickly than older RealPlayers.  Feels fast.  The UI still includes tabs for managing your media library, looking at the RealGuide, etc.  But interestingly, the RealGuide, rather than be full of links to teenybopper pop stars, is full of links to top content on YouTube, Metacafe, and the like. 
• Downloading video from the Web: Of course, the feature everyone's talking about, RP11 adds a "Download This" link to videos that appear on any Web site with video.  Shown is a screenshot showing the button added to a Brightcove page:
  
• Clicking the download button gets you a download manager that resembles Firefox's download manager. 
• Videos go into your video library in their native format -- no conversions or obfuscating file names -- it's just there in plain view in the home directory (\My Documents\My Videos\RealPlayer Downloads by default)

One interesting thing about RP11 is what it will not download:

• RTMP Streaming Flash video (from a Flash Media Server or equivalent) will not download.  Only HTTP-delivered FLV will work. 
• DRM-protected video will not download.

The built-in "Share This" button on RealPlayer sends a link to the original video content.

All in all, I found that RP11 downloads video successfully from a wide variety of sites, including YouTube, Metacafe, Brightcove, CNN and others.  My first "cannot record this" hit came from Harvard@Home's Human Systems Explorer site, which uses true Flash rtmp streaming from Akamai.

Not a bad first impression. Some things need further exploration.  For example, I haven't yet found out how to hide, when the player first opens, the window that shows the RealGuide, the Library, and other stuff that's not "just the video, please".  Maybe this fits with Real's apparent strategy to make the standalone player into a good media download/management center and leave the embedded player for "video only" uses.  I'll post more info as I learn more.

Is RealPlayer going to make a comeback?

Real Networks' newest RealPlayer player appears to be a huge departure from their earlier client-side products.  While the Helix server technology and the RealVideo codecs have been ones-to-beat in streaming media technology, the RealPlayer has been the face of the company to the user community - and it hasn't always been a pretty face.  Real's marketing folks, in the heat of their battle for survival with Microsoft, saw RealPlayer as a the company's direct pipeline to users' pocketbooks.  

Let's face it - the RealPlayer, despite its technological excellence (SMIL 1.0 & 2.0, universal format support, the industry's best codecs, and support for nearly every OS and browser out there) became an abomination - big heavy download, cumbersome registration required, ads and eye candy all over the place, "notifications" that pop up and annoy with marketing messages.

Fast-forward to today -- In the new world of the Web, Flash is taking over because its player is everywhere and its user experience is simple, unmarred by distractions, and an easy download in the unlikely case you need it.  I've even been able to install the Flash player using Firefox's XPI Flash installer - no UI whatsoever, just one click and it's in.

So with many of Real's remaining customers (there are many, especially in the higher-education industry) avidly looking for alternatives to RealPlayer, and Real rapidly approaching irrelevance in the video technology space, RealNetworks has come up with a new approach. Real's new player (RealPlayer 11) boasts two major innovations:

1. The player is small and unobtrusive, with a quick, easy install that asks no questions, takes over nothing, and generally leaves you alone.
2. In what could be a stunning new capability, RP11 will download non-DRM-protected video from any website, in any format (Flash. Real, QuickTime, WindowsMedia, etc).  While you're watching that video on YouTube, Google, Metacafe, Brightcove, or anywhere else, RP11 will add a little "save this" button to the video itself. 

The idea is that RealPlayer becomes the base of your personal video library. You can share (by sending around links to the original source), or with a $30 upgrade, burn to DVD disc. Presumably, one of these options will let you easily flip content to your iPod.  There's a pretty good video demo given by Real VP Jeff Chasen at Scobleizer.com.

Dan Rayburn at the Business of Online Video blog wonders what's the business advantage to Real?


He's not alone.  Real's CEO Rob Glaser makes his case in his post The World Isn't Flat, and responds directly to Rafat Ali's "Open Questions to Rob Glaser" in his own RealNetworks Blog post.


My take?  Looking at the education industry, up to now I see a large investment in Real's technology that's been feeling more and more like a liability, strictly because of the horrendous RealPlayers of the RealONE/RP10 generation.  Folks are looking at costly switches to Flash video infrastructure not because the video or server technology is so great, but mainly because the player has mindshare and doesn't do anything to piss-off its users.  

So, if Real's new player is something that a) is a no-brainer to install and use; and b) provides truly useful functionality on top of the enormous-and-growing world of online video content, it may just become relevant again to online users. And that's good for Real's existing customers, for sure.  How that helps Real acquire new paying customers isn't clear to me, but I'd guess that anything that makes RealPlayer more relevant in the marketplace has to be a good first step.

Is Amazon's S3 the cheapest streaming video hosting out there?

While researching CDNs for storage and delivery of digital video, I found that at least one major user-generated video website provider is using Amazon's S3 service for delivery of Flash video over HTTP. For http delivery of lots of clips on-demand, S3 is apparently doing the job.  The costs are astonishingly low:

• $0.15/GB stored per month
• $0.18/GB delivered (or less)

A look at Dan Rayburn's recent blog post listing streaming CDN vendors shows some of the streaming heavyweights, with broad networks of origin and edge servers optimized for real-time media delivery.  Akamai, for example, pre-caches media content close to the network's edges, making videos load quicker. For a site that's advertising-funded, fast loading pages can lead to more page views, which equals more revenue. 

But, S3 is an option I hadn't thought of for online video.  There's no support for the RTMP or RTSP streaming protocols, but many sites are just fine with HTTP download delivery these days. (Streaming vs. Downloading - What's the Difference?)  While it may not be optimized around realtime delivery, it certainly offers unlimited scalability at rock-bottom prices.  And options like its rich developer API and BitTorrent integration could be an asset to a comprehensive media delivery strategy.  It's certainly an option worth looking at.    

Image, Audio & Video Search - Reading Content and Context

In his article, Improving Image Search, Harvard's Michael Hemment writes about a research project at UC San Diego that uses human-generated sample data to train an engine that analyses images to extract searchable metadata. 


This is an interesting topic. I'm reminded of several related topics -- all involved in extracting useful metadata from binary media objects :

• The Music Genome Project and their Pandora site. Uses human-generated metadata to describe the music, but using fields very similar in concept to the data in VIA or the seed data used in SML. 
• Using OCR tools to identify and index text that appears in an image. Google's Orcopus project is an open-source way to do this, although commercial products like Pictron do it for images and video. 
• Speech-recognition on audio/video content is similarly a way to try to index the otherwise opaque contents of a binary media file. What's odd is how little use this has gotten in the real world, even though the technology has been around for quite some years.
  
  I read somewhere on the web recently, (can't recall the source) the correct observation that hugely popular video sites like YouTube are built on making video findable by using very primitive metadata combined with the all-important context. Who else likes this? What else has this person created/bookmarked/shared? What comments and tags have users applied? All have turned out to be far more useful than a full transcript or speech-recognition search. 

One burning question for me is, why is searching inside a PDF massively useful, but searching inside a video just doesn't quite hit the mark?  What's holding video or image searching back?  Is it the quality of the metadata we extract and index?  Does video simply contain less information density (in its transcript) than a written article (i.e. have you ever read the transcript of a half-hour program, only to realize that you can read/skim it in less than 3 minutes?)? Or do people simply use these kinds of assets differently than they do text-based documents, so different rules and benefits apply when searching?  

e-Learning 2.0 - The End of the Course?

Will blogs, wikis, Web search and other implements of informal learning replace the instructional designer, the teaching faculty, and the very concept of an academic course?

Tony Karrer of TechEmpower spoke at a session of Harvard Business School's BrainGain instructional technology speaker series yesterday about the impact that these technologies are having on transforming corporate training, and to some extent traditional education.  When can a collaborative wiki take the place of traditional course materials to facilitate learning in an organization?  How do blogs extract value from personal communication in ways that email does not?  Tony's recent blog entries  eLearning Business Alternatives, Disruptive Changes in Learning and Content Vendor Value address these trends.

I'm a strong believer in the unmatched information-gathering capability Web tools give learners.  The growth of Web 2.0 technologies serves to multiply the effect, with mashups, add-ins and simple cross-publishing of content from one site to another providing the free-form platform that allows end users to create new value in the ecosystem.   Online reference resources created by user communities can be more effective means of compiling and distributing the right information in the right-sized chunks. 

But I'm not a believer that all of this is always going to be an effective substitute for an educational curriculum.  Education is more than skills training.  It's challenging the way students think. It's walking them down a path that builds on basics, builds a knowledge base that grows eventually to become more than the sum of its parts.  It's providing a context that helps motivate and direct the learners' efforts.  If information were the same as education, we could plop a set of Web resources and books in front of first-year college kids and say "Have at it! Become chemists!" and they'd do it on their own.  (Actually a very few students could probably pull this off, due to their intrinsic motivation, ability, and interest in the topic.)  In real life, people often need teachers, coaches, trainers, and leaders to help them deliver their best.  

At their worst, courses can be boring, irrelevant, or wrongly-paced for their students.  At their best, they are highly motivating, are transformational experiences that give the learner an entirely new context for how to think about a problem, and provide a framework of basic knowledge that serves as a solid foundation for future learning (formal or informal).

Alternatively, collaborative E-Learning 2.0 resources at their worst can be random piles of facts (of unknown accuracy), filtered by groupthink and presented with limited context.  At their best, they are the collective, first-hand knowledge of countless experts, organized and interlinked in a way that creates rich context that no instructional designer could have imagined (let alone implemented).  

I'm thinking, there's going to continue to be room for both for a long time.  Tony's blog post mentions Valerie Bock, whose assessment I agree with:

Subscribing to RSS feeds, tags and searches is a great way for an individual to keep abreast of what’s happening in her field. Contributing to communities of practice is a terrific way to pass on hard-won expertise. It’s all good.

But it’s not sufficient. In the frantic, multi-tasking environments in which we all work, there is perhaps a more urgent need than ever for content which is the product of careful reflection about just what is essential, and how it fits into an overall framework.

We think the future of learning is in the engagement of learners with each other, and with skilled facilitators, around that content.

Online Video and Web 2.0 - What's missing?

Dan Rayburn points out in his Business of Online Video blog that streaming video isn't a Web 2.0 technology.  But while Dan's point is that streaming video has been around way too long to be considered part of the Web 2.0 "fad", I think the relationship between video and Web 2.0 is more complicated than that.  

The key ingredient of "Web 2.0" technologies that makes them worthy of that label is that they have open APIs and are freeform platforms that allow user behavior to define and create value.  Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee says it well...


...so, to build a Web 2.0 service, Andy says, 

• Build platforms, not channels
• Make sure they're initially freeform
• Build in mechanisms for emergence.  These mechanisms include links, tags, powerful search...

...and, I'd add, simple APIs for combining and syndicating content from one site to another.  Sites like YouTube are on the edge of Web 2.0 because of the ease with which users can publish their content not just to YouTube, but to other sites.  Web 2.0 facilitates video mashups: videos can be embedded across sites, search results can be published as RSS, users can "mash-up" collections of video with photos from Flickr and maps from Google or Yahoo.

But, Dan's right - video isn't really Web 2.0 enough, yet.  As Microsoft's Jon Udell points out, 


Standard ways to search within video, associate a video timeline with other media, and deep-link into video content simply don't exist.  RealPlayer and WindowsMedia always did offer a way to deep link using start parameters in the .ram or .asx file URLs, but the endless variety of custom Flash video players (since there isn't really an official, usable "standard" one) means that even that simple method is no longer available on most sites.  And as for search -- while web search engines crawling into a Word document or a PDF file is routine, video content search hasn't caught on, even though the technology, from (the defunct) Virage, Streamsage (now part of Comcast) , Pictron, Podzinger, and others, has been around for years.  

So, Online Video 2.0 is yet to be born - while video is a part of the Web 2.0 ecosystem that generates value from unscripted user behavior on freeform platforms, it's not yet ready to BE one of those freeform platforms.

Fundamentals of Website Development - Course Resources

Last night I had the privilege of giving a guest lecture on streaming video in Dave Heitmeyer's Harvard course, Fundamentals of Web Development.  As a follow-up, here are some further information and references on topics that came up in the class.

• Streaming media metafiles
• RealVideo RAM
• WindowsMedia ASX
• Quicktime QTL
• SMIL
• An old article from WebTechniques magazine in 1998, but still a good illustration of what's possible)  [code example and download site]  [original article]
• More recent SMIL 2.0 documentation from RealNetworks
• The "Chess Playing" SMIL demos I showed in class (from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Article on embedded event triggers in media files - Again, an old one.  Security changes in browsers have made some of these examples not work right anymore without some tweaking.  But the basic embedding technique is still valid for simple things like loading a new URL into another frame. .  
• Real's documentation on event triggers: [pdf file] - look for the section called DEFINING EVENTS AND IMAGE MAPS
• Captioning with SMIL or RealText
• Info on the full-featured, metafile-aware Flash Video Player 3.6
• Detailed and complete codec and encoding tool testing from streamingmedia.com - costs a few hundred bucks but well worth it if you need to be able to get top performance from your video encoding
• Free Akamai best practices gujides:  (BTW, I wrote these.  Akamai requests your contact info to download. they only ask once and you get unlimited, perpetual access to all the whitepapers.)
• Best Practices for Producing On-Demand Video for the Web - detailed info on formats, codecs, encoding practices, including what all the settings mean and how to select them]
• Best Practices for Podcasting - which codecs support which devices, and how do I produce and deliver podcasts

Anything I forgot..?  Leave me a comment and I'll update this as needed...

A Full-Featured Flash Video Player

Flash video is great for users, but the player lacks easy, built-in features Web developers have come to expect.  But now, Jeroen Wijering has developed the full-featured Flash Video Player 3.6 which finally makes all the features of a "real" video player available to Web developers using Flash video on their sites.

The standard video players - RealPlayer, Quicktime and WindowsMedia - all have APIs that help make it easy to embed interactive video onto a Web page.  The major video platforms provided simple run-time customization capabilities that developers have come to expect from video platforms.  By setting values in either the web page or the metafile (.ram, .asx, .qtl), you could accomplish a lot:

• support for metafiles that can be generated on-the-fly
• playlists
• background colors and logos
• captioning
• control over the appearance of the player controls
• fullscreen mode
• autostart and repeat behavior

Naturally, if you are a Flash developer, you can make a player that handles all of this.  Indeed, unless you're simply hard-coding an .flv URL into the stock Flash video player, you have to do Flash development to make a more capable player.  Jeroen's Flash Video Player 3.6 solves all that.  With an elegant API that works through metafiles or FlashVars, you can customize the playback experience without having to do a lick of Flash development.  What's more, a full Javascript API includes controls (playlist navigation, play/pause, scrub and seek, volume control, and movie loading), Javascript callbacks, and metadata extraction.

This player covers all the important bases in terms of the video player capabilities Web developers need, and makes publishing Flash video as easy as publishing Real, QT or Windows Media.  It's distributed under a Creative Commons License, free for non-commercial use, and nearly free for commercial use.

Online Video Industry Index

The folks at Read/WriteWeb have put together a terrific Online Video Industry Index that provides a snapshot of the current online video marketplace.  It's not about hardware or software vendors, like Sorenson, Accordent, or Adobe, but rather sums up the online services space very well.  This list breaks the industry down into categories that include Video Sharing, Video Search, Video Editing & Creation, Video eCommerce, Video Streaming, and others.  

I've been working in this space a lot lately, and have worked with many of the providers on this list, including some as-yet little-known ones.  While the authors disclaim the index as "not complete", to my eye it looks pretty comprehensive.   One useful addition would be Sorenson Media, which is getting into the space with its Squishnet video management service.

This is a great resource. In particular, many of the vendors in this index, as well as being consumer-oriented destinations for video, offer enterprise services and developer APIs that let companies and educational institutions build custom, branded video services on hosted infrastructure. Because of this, the consumer video Web is relevant far beyond the entertainment focus that's driving its growth.

Flash streaming encoding settings - what are sites like YouTube doing? (and how can you find out?)

I'm trying to do something simple - find out the codec and bitrate information for Flash FLV videos found on the Web.  In RealPlayer, the "Statistics" menu option reveals everything you need to know, and shows even more if you launch it in "Debug" mode (holding the crtl-shift keys as you select 'Statistics" from the menu).  WindowsMedia provides similar info if you select "Properties" while it's playing. But Flash?  You're out of luck unless you do some extra work.  

My solution may not be the slickest one, but it's one I could work out in a few minutes of Googling around.  You need two things:

1. First, a tool to download the FLV file to your local system so you can open it with a program that will expose the technical details you want.
2. A program that analyzes the clip and outputs the codec and bitrate details of the file. 

Stumbling around, I found two options for downloading:

• The Firefox extension Video Downloader.  This grabs embedded media from a page and saves it locally.  For video, it only works if the video is delivered via http download (not streaming). 
• A Windows tool called WM Recorder 11.  This one hooks into your TCP/IP stack to automatically record any streaming content coming to your computer, including rtsp, mms, and rtmp streams. As a stream recorder, it's a very cool new option in addition to the old standby I wrote about in 2003, Cucusoft's StreamDown [buy].    

For examining the contents of a file, Moyea FLV Converter [buy] seems to be the best one of those I tried for extracting all the information from files encoded with both the H.263/Spark and On2 VP6 codecs. 

Some interesting findings?

• YouTube, Metacafe, and Google are all doing Flash 7 - Sorenson Spark via http download.  Spark, based on H.263 isn't so great by today's standards, which explains why video on these sites often looks so bad. On the other hand it is compatible with Flash 7, making the installed base of players close to 100%.   It can also be encoded from a command-line (or from website code) using free or open-source tools like ffmpeg and Riva. Some video/audio bitrates I sampled are:
• YouTube - 240kbps/64kbps
• Google - 282kbps/64kbps
• Metacafe - 330kbps/48kbps
• Brightcove is rtmp streaming using the excellent Flash 8 VP6 codec, bitrates range from 308k/64k to 640k/96k.
• Feedroom (responsible for video news sites like New York Times and USAToday is using rtmp streaming, but it's using another level of indirection in its site that makes its streams  not capturable by WMRecorder.

Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links. Any of the pennies that trickle in from purchases of these products from these links will help support the ongoing costs of maintaining this site.

  

Video encoding tools, codec comparison

Which Web video format is the best? Which encoding tool is the best one?  Which tools handle high-action video best?  If part of your job involves encoding digital video for Web delivery, you must read streamingmedia.com's research reports on codecs and encoders.  Some of the key points are summarized in  Jan Ozer's article, Choosing a Codec. Some highlights for me:

• RealVideo is the best overall codec of all the tested choices, and became the benchmark against the others were compared.
• Differerent codecs were best at handling each combination of encoding bitrate and content type (e.g. talking head vs. sports video) 
• Some tools encode some formats and content types exceptionally well, while doing a poor job on others.  
• VBR (variable bitrate) won't always offer an improvement over CBR (constant bitrate), even for high-motion content. 

The two reports, Proprietary Codecs, 2006: Choosing and Using the Optimal Video Codec and  Flash Codecs, 2006: Choosing and Using the Optimal Flash Codec are, unfortunately, not free,  but they are treasure-troves of information about codecs and encoding software.  I recently bought a copy of each, and plan to site-license them for all the folks involved in encoding digital media at Harvard University, where I'm the University's Multimedia Technology Architect.  

Although I've been a contributing editor to streamingmedia.com and have friends there, I have no financial interest in these reports. I just think there's awfully helpful!

User-Generated Media - Challenges & Solutions for Business and Academia

Social networking and user-generated content (UGC) sites present unique technical challenges, which lead to unique business challenges.  While unexpected growth is a potential problem for any online site, it is both the holy grail and (in the spirit of "be careful what you wish for") a ticking time bomb for social networking sites. 

A new whitepaper from Akamai (also available free from streamingmedia.com) goes into some depth about the special factors that affect social networking sites.  Some highlights:

• User-generated content sites are the fastest-growing category of web site (by unique visitors) on the Net, showing, in some cases, triple digit year-over-year growth. Of the ten fastest growing web brands, five are UGC sites (for example, Flickr and Wikipedia). 
• Social networking/UGC sites have, by definition, unpredictable storage and bandwidth needs, making technical infrastructure (and therefore, budget and capital expense) planning a crap shoot.  Outsourced capacity on-demand is an important option to consider before you're faced with site-crippling runaway success. 
• Success is tied closely to having a fast innovation cycle -- try stuff out, see how it works for your users.  Continually sense-and-respond to user needs to find that sweet spot of simplicity, functionality, and sustainability that makes your site sticky and social.  One way to do this is to minimize the time and effort you put into infrastructure build-out and put it into more creative endeavors. 
• If you're an ad-driven site, performance is directly tied to revenue, as faster loading pages keep eyeballs on the site, lead to more page views per user, and therefore register more ad impressions.  When Friendster moved to Akamai's delivery network in March 2006, they saw an immediate 33% decrease in page load times, and a threefold uptick in page views.

Even for an educational institution, outsourcing certain infrastructure is appealing.  With service-oriented Web APIs, it can be easier now to work with a vendor/partner than it is to build it myself.  If I want to put up a quick video recording/encoding/sharing service for my users, I can:

• Build it myself - not always a bad idea, and definitely a quick-and-dirty solution for a pilot or proof-of-concept, provided I have to staff and the time to move it from P-O-C to production-ready if the need arises.  
• Acquire and deploy an inexpensive product.  I was surprised to find YouTube clones like Clip'Share and Altrasoft VideoShare for a few hundred bucks or less.  Again - good for a proof-of-concept.  May or may not offer enough for coping with real success.
• Use a Web Service API like that from Video Egg or JumpCut to handle all the media operations, while you focus just on your website.  These services handle media input (in the case of Video Egg, from webcam and cell phone, as well as file upload). transcoding, online editing and delivery.  It can provide a platform for rapid development of your own custom solutions, as well as a scalable solution in case your solution takes off.  

I'm generally a big fan of institutions building their media solutions in-house, but the combination of the unpredictable needs of user-generated media, the ease and excellence of some of the vendor service-based APIs, and the need to be able to innovate quickly without up-front investment in big infrastructure creates some interesting possibilities.  

The Akamai white paper, Successful Social Networking and User-Generated-Content Applications: What You Need to Know, (which, by the way, I wrote) addresses some other challenges of social and UGC sites -- how edge-caching works with dynamic content, how to control costs when growth is unpredictable, options for exercising editorial control over UGC sites, and some examples of how social networking is being used by businesses to build revenue and create new opportunities.  

A Magnificent Resource of Educational Technology Case Studies

The National Center of Academic Transformation (NCAT) website contains a treasure-trove of case studies that will interest anyone involved in educational technology.  From 1999-2004, NCAT worked with 30 higher-ed institutions to redesign selected courses to meet goals like reducing costs, handling increasing enrollment, and improving quality and student outcomes.  NCAT focused on using technology to support several models of course design, from supplementing a face-to-face class with technology aids to moving an 800-student course to an entirely online format.

The entire projects are described, including planning, budgeting, outcomes, and lessons learned.  Some of the lessons learned are important and counter-intuitive, others are firm confirmations of what you might expect. But it's worth taking some time to read through some of the studies, as there's something to be learned from each. Here are a few interesting extracts from the studies:

• Having a "buffet" of course information, related resources and activities available to students sounds like a better idea than it really turns out to be.    A carefully designed "buffet" of varied course materials (videos, lectures, labs, online tests) at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) went entirely unused by the 387 students in the course.  (The FCGU course, which moved a large lecture-format face-to-face course in Visual Arts to an all-online environment, was nonetheless an unqualified success based on other attributes of its design.)  This supports the results found by Lonnie Harvel at Georgia Tech, in which students' own course notes (in electronic format) were enhanced by turning subject-related keywords into links to related resources.  In the trial, students never clicked on any of the links to related material, choosing instead to stick to the linear path of required material.
  
  
• Supporting multiple learning styles means more than making varied materials available.  Ohio State University found some measurable benefit to providing learning-style options, but only students who attended orientation sessions on how to choose saw benefit.  OSU methodically associated every item of course material to a 90-term taxonomy of learning objectives, giving students a clear understanding of what was expected, no matter the learning style they chose.
  
  
• Required for-credit practice quizzes directly affect student performance.  At the University of New Mexico, "students in one section received course points for completion of weekly online mastery quizzes; students in the other section were encouraged to take the mastery quizzes, but received no course points for doing so. On in-class exams, students who were required to complete quizzes for credit always outperformed students for whom taking quizzes was voluntary."  FGCU had similar results.
  
  
• At FGCU, students worked in teams via online threaded-discussion boards to analyze and critique essays.  "At FGCU, students completed Web Board discussions where they analyzed sample short essays in preparation for writing their own short essays. One of the essays was a strong essay and the other a weak essay. Working in peer learning teams of six students each, students had to determine which was strong and which was weak and explain why. The Web Board discussions increased interaction among students, created an atmosphere of active learning, and developed students’ critical thinking skills." Student performance on subsequent exam essay questions exceeded that of previous semesters under the face-to-face teaching model.  
  

In all the cases, details including gains (or not) in student performance are provided.  Many schools were able to compare control groups to redesigned-course groups, which makes this a uniquely informative resource.  

Is Learning Online Like Watching Football on TV?

The challenge of effective eLearning is finding ways to leverage the medium that simply can't be equaled in solely traditional teaching environments.  Can students learn better from online-instruction than from in-person instruction?  One example pointed out to me was the wildly different experience of listening to a string quartet play live in a real space as compared to listening to the radio or even a CD on a good audio system.  Does the presence, energy, acoustic power, and ambiance of that live performance extend through the electronic realm?  Sort of, but it's just not the same.  Would you willingly deny anyone the option of the in-person experience without good reason?

To me, the alternate example is the professional football game.  Sure, sitting at the top section of a stadium with 85,000 of your closest friends is a social experience with an energy that's hard to beat; but for actually watching a game, nothing beats a TV (even a small one) with instant replay, close-ups of the action, and that bright yellow line that marks the yardage for a first down.  

Which led me to this:  The challenge for eLearning and distance education is to identify the "yellow lines" of the medium -- those things that represent something inherently valuable but simply not possible in the traditional-teaching realm.  Maybe eLearning's real advantage will remain rooted in the fact not that it competes with in-person teaching, but that it allows learning where in-person teaching is not possible or practical.  But I think there's also some "yellow-line" capabilities waiting to be explored, even where educational technology supports (rather than supplants) in-person learning.  

One example of a genuinely new and interesting capability is the digital pen note-taking integration done by Tegrity in their classroom capture system.  I've long been a user of Logitech's digital pen.  The pen allows you to write on special notebook paper, and captures everything you write to your computer as a perfect digital image of the page you wrote.  You can print pages, share them via email, as well as add text and drawing to the page in the computer, making pages indexable and searchable.  What Tegrity has done is to tie the note-taking with the digital pen to the timeline of the video/slides (marketing demo video) captured during a live lecture.  Students who took notes during the class can, at their own PCs, bring up their notes on-screen alongside the lecture video. The lecture video, the instructor's notes, and the student's notes all become part of a synchronized presentation.  Notes can go from being a one-shot chance to get the main points down (sometimes at the expense of really listening) to being a guide to review and further exploration.  I don't know if it will transform teaching and learning, but it struck me as an example of a stunningly clever and useful application of technology to do something that was previously quite impossible.

There's a lot of activity in researching the effect of these technologies.  One interesting study is Lonnie Harvel's dissertation Using Student-Generated Notes as an Interface to a Digital Repository (pdf).  Harvel explores the surprisingly low use of digital repositories in education by experimenting with methods to integrate lectures, student notes, and external resources in deeply integrated ways.