From our frequent discussions with educational technologists at colleges and universities across the country, we are seeing lots of anecdotal evidence showing a rapid increase in the adoption of the Macromedia Flash media delivery platform in fully online, blended and technology-enhanced teaching and learning environments.

In particular, Breeze Presenter and Breeze Meeting are two Macromedia software products getting a lot of traction in higher education these days. As noted at the Macromedia website, Breeze Presenter “enables PowerPoint authoring of narrated, self-paced e-learning courses and on-demand presentations and provides unique support for high-impact content through adaptive streaming of audio and video. The Breeze Presenter drag-and-drop audio editor and wizard-based quiz and survey creation enable subject matter experts to easily deliver professional-quality e-learning courses. Breeze courses can also be delivered and tracked by SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004 and AICC-compatible LMS systems.” Breeze Meeting “delivers real-time meetings and seminars that everyone can access instantly, through any web browser, without downloading cumbersome plug-ins. Breeze Meeting provides unparalleled support for sharing rich content, including streaming audio, video, and software simulations, and also enables multi-point video conferencing.” ¹

Macromedia is Now Adobe
Macromedia was officially acquired by Adobe Systems Incorporated in early December 2005 in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. ² Prior to this, Macromedia embarked on its own acquisition strategy in early 2003 when it acquired Presidia, a privately held company with some very nifty software for enhancing PowerPoint presentations with audio, animations, and quizzing and survey applications for the Flash platform.³

Case Studies
Macromedia has always done a great job of promoting its software to higher education. Its website, for instance, is loaded with interesting case studies (41 at last count) of how institutions have effectively used its products.⁴

We went searching for some instances of Breeze Presenter and Breeze Meeting adoption outside of these case studies and found the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Bloomberg School of Public Heath, where Brian Klass, systems designer in the Bloomberg School’s Distance Education Group, talked with us about their overall use of the Macromedia Flash delivery platform, in general. We found the Bloomberg School and Klass through a web search on this topic that took us to one of our favorite publications, Campus Technology (formerly Syllabus), where Klass had written a very informative article back in June 2003 about streaming media in higher education. ⁵ (More from Klass later in this story.)

JHU Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology
The Bloomberg School’s Distance Education Group is part of the larger JHU Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology (CTLT). The Distance Education Group, which started in 1996, supports the development of online courses for the JHU Internet-based Master of Public Health (MPH) Degree, which launched in 1999 (see accompanying article “About the JHU Part-time Internet-based MPH Program”).

CTLT is a 20-person staff comprised of instructional designers, web developers, technical editors, medical illustrators, multimedia specialists, audio producers and quality-control personnel who serve only the Bloomberg School. CTLT provides all of the Bloomberg School faculty support through workshops and the development and management of a wide variety of online resources.

Additionally, CTLT is responsible for the development of on-demand public health training modules for the Center For Public Health Preparedness (CPHP) and the Mid-Atlantic Training Center. The JHU CPHP is part of an integrated, national system of centers, funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, that provides a continuum of accessible learning opportunities for public health workers around the country. There are 40 such centers nationwide that train personnel charged with carrying out CDC programs and the control and prevention of bioterrorism and infectious disease. The MidAtlantic Public Health Training Center works in partnership with the JHU CPHP to ensure frontline public health workers in Maryland, Delaware and Washington, D.C. have the skills and competencies required to respond effectively to current and emerging health threats, including Bioterrorism.

CTLT also keeps busy with the preparation of public health online materials for the Bloomberg School’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, which provides free, searchable access to the School’s course materials to anyone who visits the OCW website.

Sukon Kanchanaraksa, CTLT director and a JHU associate scientist, Epidemiology, says that thousands of people visit the website and that one course, in particular, titled Statistical Reasoning, is extremely popular. The OCW site just recently celebrated its one year anniversary, and plans are to have at least 100 courses up in due time.

Adoption of Audio & Chat
Kanchanaraksa further explains how, back in the mid 90s, he and Professor of Biostatistics Marie Diener-West developed a quantitative methods in public health course using a combination of the RealPlayer platform and Microsoft NetMeeting for presenting audio-based lectures with live chat sessions. The course was the beginning of the Bloomberg School’s foray into streaming media via a home-grown tool created by CTLT, called “LiveTalk,” which is used extensively in its Internet-based MPH program.

As noted on its website - inside an extremely professional and informative online course demo - titled “The Online Experience” and presented in Macromedia Flash (see accompanying article “A Sophisticated Course Demo”) - LiveTalk is uniquely defined to prospective students as a special technology that works “like a radio call-in show for the Internet. Students listen to the course faculty and their guests via a live audio stream over the Internet, and students communicate via text chat with faculty and other students.”

Moving Over to Breeze for Streaming Core Content
Kanchanaraksa says that LiveTalk is in the process of being converted over to Breeze Meeting. In addition, web-based course lectures in the Internet-based MPH program, provided as PowerPoints with audio that are archived and accessible any time, were historically presented in the RealPlayer format and have recently been converted over to Breeze Presenter and the Flash delivery platform.

Klass explains how the online MPH program has always used streaming media to deliver its core content because the overall curriculum has always had strong lecture components. “The faculty here are very comfortable with lecturing, and it is the common way of delivering didactic information to students,” he says, adding that the Distance Education Group decided a long time ago that delivering lectures via text instead of via streaming media can be overly time consuming, especially when dealing with faculty who are more heavily involved with research than with teaching. Basically, instead of asking faculty to write their lectures and then have assistants edit them for presenting online, the Distance Education Group captures audio and/or video of faculty lectures and syncs that with PowerPoints inside Breeze Presenter.

CTLT has been converting over from Real to Flash for a number of reasons. RealNetworks, Inc., is a pioneer in the Internet media industry that continues to grow substantially in the consumer marketplace with some of its biggest profitability coming from selling consumers paid-subscription access to music and games. ⁶ However, Klass says that while Real is a powerful platform for assembling multimedia presentations in higher education, “there’s an advertising, marketing, company-driven element that gets in the way.” According to Klass, the free, downloadable Real Player has become “bloated with a web browser,” so visitors wind up viewing lots of news and advertisements related to Real’s online music and games stores. “If my content goes in there next to an ad for Trojan Condoms or the Hummer, that is completely unprofessional, and it is not something I want my content to be part of,” says Klass.

Better CODECs
Another reason why Klass has grown to like Macromedia is that he believes Flash has great CODECs, which is an acronym for compressor/depressor technology “that is used both for putting a movie into a compressed format that is ready for streaming down to the end user, as well as the technology that takes those little bits and pieces that get streamed down to the end user and turns them into a movie on your computer.”
 
The latest version of Flash uses the CODEC from On2 Technologies. Klass explains that CTLT basically explored the different ways of delivering presentations in a bandwidth friendly format that would allow the Distance Education Group to mix together PowerPoints with images, text, video, and activities that would enable more interaction with content, and Flash became “the way to go. It provides you with all sorts of tools and options. You can put video in Flash, you can put audio in Flash, you can put whole applications inside a Flash movie, as well as PowerPoint slides and audio - the whole nine yards.”

In addition, Flash is a simple, cross-platform plug-in, Klass continues. “It works in pretty much every browser, on a Mac, as well as in a Windows environment; it works in Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Netscape. So it is very common. Plus, people do not have to download a 15- or 30-megabyte file in order to watch course content. If they need to update their Flash player on their computer, it is less than one megabyte in size, which, even on a dial up connection, will occur very fast. So, it is a lightweight, universal player that is common and readily available.”

Bandwidth Concerns
Finally, when creating these kinds of streaming media-based teaching and learning environments, the issue of how much bandwidth should you utilize to broadcast effectively becomes vitally important, Klass claims. “Because we have an international audience (30 percent of the students enrolled in the Internet-based MPH program, for instance, are international students living overseas) bandwidth is one of our primary concerns. A lot of the people (who access the Bloomberg School’s streaming-media content available throughout its on-ground and online courses, as well as through its special initiatives, such as its on-demand public health training modules for the CPHP) are in places where public health professionals are needed the most, and that is in rural areas with poor infrastructures (for Internet access).” Klass explains that their content needs to work in both high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth environments. “Nobody can be punished for being on a dial-up connection. We have to make sure that with everything we do there is no academic disadvantage because we are using streaming media.”

Relationship with Akamai
One thing that CTLT has very much in its favor is that about five years ago it started using Akamai, a well-known content distribution network provider that has created a world wide on-demand distributed computing platform, with more than 14,000 servers in 1,100 networks in 65+ countries. Klass explains that putting the MPH program’s streaming media on Akamai’s servers is vital for facilitating reliable connections for its overseas students. “We pay for putting our content on their network, which makes it easier for our students to get our content. It has been extremely helpful and extremely successful for us.”

Although the Akamai arrangement “is not cheap,” it does add value to the Internet-based MPH program by ensuring a “better experience,” says Klass, adding that he is “a big proponent” of how students and faculty interact with content and a website. “The better experience somebody can have, the more of an evangelist they will become for your program, your content, and your way of delivering content over time.”

Endnotes:

1. Breeze System Overview
http://www.macromedia.com/software/breeze/productinfo/system_architecture/#presenter

2. “Adobe Completes Acquisition of Macromedia,” Adobe Systems Incorporated, San Jose, California, December 5, 2005
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html

3. J. Evers, “Macromedia Buys Online Presentation Software Maker,” Info World, January 17, 2003
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/03/01/17/030117hnmacromedia.html?s=IDGNS

4. See http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/showcase/index.cfm?event=finder&industryid=6&loc=en_us

5. B. Klass, “Streaming Media in Higher Education: Possibilities and Pitfalls,” Campus Technology, June 2003
http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=7769

6. P. Kafka, “RealNetworks Doubles Its Subscriber Base,” Forbes.com, February 14, 2006

Websites:

Bloomberg School

Bloomberg School MPH Program (click on Internet-Based link)

Bloomberg School’s Open Courseware Project

JHU CTLT

Macromedia in Higher Ed

Akamai

RealNetworks in Education

On2 Technologies