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transmitting an audio stream with synchronized
PowerPoint images, but shortly thereafter it
evolved into a video transmission that included
both the teacher and the slides with a technique
called chroma key
2
.
One year later. Hilt and Kuhmünch (1999)
described the results obtained in the framework
of the German Teleteaching project that was
envisioned in 1995. They portrayed three sce-
narios: the “Remote Lecture Room Scenario”',
in which lectures were transmitted live via the
Internet to lecture rooms at the partner universi-
ties, the “Remote Interactive Seminar” (much
more interactive since a discussion between the
participating actors usually took place after each
talk) and the “Interactive Home-Learning”, in
which students running Linux or Windows 95/98
on their PC watched lectures from home via an
ISDN Internet connection. Although they focused
mostly on synchronous events, some attention was
given to the asynchronous scenario.
As a variation, Chen et al. (1999) proposed a
framework to record lectures in which the teacher
presents learning material in the form of HTML
pages. The web navigation events were recorded
and associated with video, so that they could
be replayed when the students asynchronously
watched the lecture.
In these years the main challenge was to over-
come the problems caused by Internet bandwidth,
as discussed by Fong and Hui (2001). Related to
this issue, there was the choice of the software for
performing video-streaming, the main competitors
being RealVideo, Apple QuickTime and Windows
Media Video as discussed e.g. by McCrohon et al.
(2001). Since none of these solutions was really
cross-platform (supporting at least Linux, Win-
dows and Apple OS), many opted for the storage
in multiple formats. Later on Adobe Flash Video
also entered into the arena, offering universal
support. The situation is still in evolution, as
Microsoft recently responded with its Silverlight
platform in the attempt to make some previously
Windows-only products portable also to other
platforms. Obviously the quality of service of the
streaming has an impact on users' perception of
the video content, and hence on their satisfaction
and on the overall system usability, as discussed
e.g. in Chen et al. (2006).
A short time after pioneers opened the way,
showing a possible but uncertain future, big
players started getting into the scene, such as the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://
watch.mit.edu/) that is offering video-lectures
and seminars and, the University of California at
Berkeley that is, according to U.S. Government
news
3
of January 2008, the first University with a
plan to offer full courses through You Tube. Also,
recently Apple has started a dedicated section in
their iTunes platform that is called “iTunes U”
4
and
is dedicated to academic videolectures. The his-
tory of creation of the OpenCourseWare initiative
at MIT is reported by Abelson (2008). The MIT
answer
5
to the issue of whether students will balk
at paying about $26,000 per year in tuition when
they can get all their materials on line was: “Our
central value is people and the human experience
of faculty working with students in classrooms
and laboratories, and students learning from each
other, and the kind of intensive environment we
create in our residential university”. This statement
supports our view that the pedagogical experi-
ence cannot be reduced to (video)lecture, which
introduces our core topic: what is the pedagogical
value of the video-lectures?
VIDEOLECTURES FROM A
PEDAGOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Pedagogical Effectiveness
of Video-Lectures
Even though recently e-learning seems to be
passing the trough of disillusionment -i.e. the
big depression that follows greatly exaggerated
expectations in the hype cycle
6
- (Friedland et al.,
2009), it is generally believed to be an effective
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