Higher Ed TV

In my previous post, Chris Garcia from BYU Library Multimedia Team answered a few questions about the YouTube hit his team created, but if you want to see how they did this million-view video (1,357,775 at the time of this writing including 126,150 on mobile devices), just watch this short making of:

You can also learn more about the team on the blog they created:

New Spice

Mike Richwalksy from HighEdWebTech has been keeping track of interesting videos produced by institutions for some time now. So, when I saw he posted about a higher ed parody of the big social media hit video campaign, Old Spice, I checked out the video right away.

Believe it or not, but I had been so busy those past few days with work, danah boyd’s master class and a zillion other things that I hadn’t had chance yet to watch the Old Spice video before this morning. I knew it was a hit because of all the chatter on Twitter, but I didn’t feel compel to watch it until this morning.

In case you’ve been living on an island located in an ocean of work and were not in the know, here’s the original:

And, here’s the parody the Harold B. Lee Library Multimedia Team created.

Wow. Very nice job and an instant success with more than 169, 000 views at the time of this writing.

I knew you would all want to know more about how a higher ed team managed to produce and promote this viral success, so I interviewed via email Chris Garcia, HBL Library Multimedia Project Manager.

1) First, can you tell us a bit more about the team behind this video?
We are the Harold B. Lee Library’s Multimedia Production Unit. We handle all the video and media needs of the library. We record lectures, make video materials for exhibits, promote the library (exhibits, general promos, collections, services), and occasionally branch out to do something for other BYU entities. We consist of 2 full-time employees (Mike Hill, unit manager, and me, project manager) and 10-12 awesomely talented student employees, depending on the time of year. We also get a lot of support from the library itself.

2) How did you come up with the idea of this parody? What were your goals for this video?
As our job is to promote the library in anyway we had a break in between projects and we thought we’d make another “fun” promo video (some of our other ones are on youtube.com/hbllproduction). We sat down as a unit and talked about possible ideas. Our meetings and projects, for that matter, are very student driven. We wanted something that would catch on and be seen. As far as our specific goals once the project was decided upon, we really wanted to do the whole thing as smooth as possible by making sure to give our pre-production the time it needed (which really wasn’t all that much time but it worked).

3) How did you manage to write, shoot and produce this video so quickly?
We had that initial meeting on May 27th and then we were shooting it on June 12th. We worked completely as a team to write the script and even had Stephen Jones, the actor, come in and contribute to the script. We were two full-timers and 10 students. Our team is a smorgasbord of talent. Mike and I have backgrounds in media and film and we have students in BYU’s film program, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, animation, IT. We did the whole thing under $500, however, we have all our own equipment so that was not a cost specific to this project. We have really tried to setup a mentored environment here with most if not all aspects of projects being done by students. For the shoot we also called on a lot of friends to assist with the stunts on the day of the shoot as well as a lot of BYU volunteers to be extras at the three different locations. We spent hours trying to get the shirt rip-off and the backpack drop just right. We even had a practice shoot two days before the real one to make sure we knew what we were doing.

4) The video has gone viral with more than 50,000 views this morning (when I asked the questions – about 6 hours before writing this post). How did you promote it?
We started by just showing it to full-time library employees at a meeting and then two days later it went up on the web. Promotion was a library effort I think and a real example of the power of social networking. I posted the video on YouTube yesterday (July 15th) at about 11:30am. A few of us here in the unit posted it on Facebook. I send out a library wide e-mail with a link to the video and from there it exploded. After 3 hours of being up we were getting e-mails from Canada, New York, and even Sweden about the video. YouTube stops instantly updating views after about 300 (which we hit after about 45 minutes) so we were unsure of the growth after that. We had to wait until this morning to see the real response to the video.

5) Can you share a few examples of the feedback you got on campus and elsewhere?
Some of the funniest responses we’ve gotten have been our personal friends, who didn’t know we made this, sending links to us to watch it. We’ve gotten e-mails from New York Public library, the University of Alberta (who told us that some friends in the UK were all a buzz over the video), the University of Rochester, an advertising blog in Sweden (at least the person who contacted us had a Swedish phone number), and several other libraries all over the country. The comments on YouTube have been a real joy to read as well. I’ve been checking our actor’s, Stephen Jones, Facebook page and he even got a wall post from someone studying in Egypt.

Do you have online videos hosted on third-party websites such as YouTube, iTunes, Vimeo, etc. and wish they could all be found in one place – on a branded website within your domain name that will be automatically updated as soon as new videos are uploaded to the third-party websites?

Do you wish you could find a platform to invite your constituents (decentralized offices, faculty members, students and other campus community members) to submit video for you to review and use on this branded website?

Would you like such service to be free, easy to use and quick to implement?

Well, today is your lucky day, because I (with the help of the Duke team) found an open source web platform available for free (that will remain free if you choose to host your website on your server when the beta phase is over) that will do all of the above: Miro Community.

As hinted above, Duke University launched last month a website gathering all its online videos hosted on different online video sharing websites owned by different user accounts: Duke On Demand.

Duke on Demand

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Riseling, web operations manager, office of news and communications Meg McKee, program coordinator for Duke on Demand and Stephen Toback, senior manager, interactive technology services at Duke were kind enough to answer via email a few questions about this new service and its implementation.

1) Why did you decide to launch Duke on-demand? What problems were you trying to solve

As at many universities, video output at Duke has been growing rapidly over the past few years, and we also have a growing list of distribution channels such as YouTube, iTunes U, Futurity, BigThink and UStream. Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president of public affairs and government relations, asked us to produce a site that promoted all of these efforts in one place, and to tie it closely to the new Duke.edu website design. Essentially, we were hoping to create a higher-education version of popular video sites such as Hulu.

2) Can you tell us a bit more about the platform that powers Duke on Demand? Is it expensive

Duke on Demand uses open-source software developed by the Miro Community. The university’s main news and communications office, where we work, produces the site and organizes its content in collaboration with the central IT department, which provides technical expertise and support. Starting in February, we began a six-month pilot project to evaluate the systems, technology and approach.

Duke on Demand is an aggregator of video, not a publisher. It provides a user-friendly interface for viewing videos from our partners. The videos themselves are still hosted at these partner sites. This
approach provided us a scalable solution should our video requirements change in the future. We also didn’t need any additional hardware or support to run the site.

3) The site was launched just a few weeks ago. Can you tell us how it was received by the community? Any interesting traffic number or feedback?

We’ve received a lot of great feedback from across the university, and some key campus units, such as the alumni affairs office, have been highlighting it for their audiences. We’ve also been featuring the site on a new social media page we launched just a few days later. Since users can pull RSS feeds of the different categories of video, many units are starting to express interest in using these RSS feeds on their own websites.

We’ve just begun our outreach, and some of the reaction has been interesting. After we spoke with a group of arts communicators on campus, for example, one woman said that Duke on Demand inspires her to record more events for her department. Previously she would record the events but wasn’t sure how much they were watched. Duke on Demand now allows her videos to be seen and shared more widely. Since the RSS feeds refresh multiple times a day, once a department uploads the video to one of our distribution partners, the video can usually be promoted on Duke on Demand within a few hours. Our arts colleague joked that Duke on Demand is pushing her to do what she has had on her “to do” list for awhile, namely to start bringing a flip camera routinely to her department’s events on campus.

As you’d expect in the online world, the feedback can come very quickly. For example, we posted a video on a Monday about the 1000th game at Duke for our legendary Coach K. Our social media coordinator used the “Share This” link on Duke on Demand to share this video with Duke University’s Facebook page that same afternoon. By the next morning, there were 267 ‘likes’ and 38 comments on the Facebook post.

Want to know how easy it is to implement such a website?

Have a look at Higher Ed TV, a new website I’ve created in about 3 hours with the Miro Community platform. I’ll tell you more about this new project in a next post. In the meantime, feel free to explore and let me know what you think.

A few weeks before the “That’s I chose Yale” video was released, two admissions officers from the University of Delaware launched another musical into the wild, Reading Season.

Their video struck a chord in admissions offices across the country even though it was just a side project for both admissions officers.

When I interviewed Avi Amon about his video back in December, he hinted that there might be other videos created as part of a recruitment push at the University of Delaware.

Avi contacted me a few days ago to let me know about his new project: creating a full-length admissions video including requests and even photos from students, a video that will be produced based on suggestions from prospective students.

What a great idea!

To get some interest in this project, the admissions office created another tongue-in-cheek video and included it in the email sent to 200,000 prospective students earlier this month.

Here’s this call-to-action video:

Students were asked to submit an online form including basic contact information as well as what they would like to see in the video. They can also challenge the admission office to include some unusual elements in the video.

So, how has been the response so far?

More than 1,400 views on YouTube and some good feedback from the target audience according to Avi Amon:

So far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Students have been excited that we are reaching out to them! Responses vary from the basic (I’d like to see the engineering building) to the more thought-provoking. (how will I know that UD is a good fit for me?).

I’ll make sure to keep you updated about this project.
In the meantime, tell what you think by posting a comment!

Unless you’ve been really, really busy (and away from your computer, iPhone or iPad – wait that one isn’t out there yet ;-), you’ve already heard about Yale’s admissions video: “That’s why I chose Yale,” a 16-minute tongue-in-cheek musical, highly produced but all done by students or recent alums.

Picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post and other big names in media, the video has gone viral on YouTube (more than 300,000 views at the time of this writing) – and has resulted in many high praises as well as angry comments on different blogs and listservs.

Here’s the video in case you didn’t get a chance to watch it yet:

Brian Niles from TargetX – who is very well connected in the admissions world – managed to contact Andrew Johnson, senior assistant director of undergraduate admissions who was behind this production, and got him to sit in front of a web camera for a 20-minute discussion about the video.

No time to watch the interview now?
Here are my notes:

• The video wasn’t designed to be put online initially, but to be used as a fun introduction before the traditional information session and the campus tour. Johnson explained that it was meant to be used as one component of a campus visit and definitely not as part of a new branding campaign. However, it was decided at some point to put it online.
• They decided to do the video in-house with students after requesting some bids from video production companies. Johnson said it was done with a little amount of money – about 10% of what professional companies were asking for this type of video. When prompted to give a dollar amount for the video budget, Johnson explained that it had not been tallied up yet as the expenses were on several admissions officers’ credit cards (Really? Wow).
• The video took 10 days to film and several to edit. The video was then reviewed in house to make sure it was vetted.
• The musical format was chosen to showcase a more fun yet accurate side of Yale. The student film maker, Ethan Kuperberg, had just completed a musical when he was asked to do this project. Johnson managed the project, but also wrote the music.

Make sure you watch this great video interview by Target X to learn more as I’ve just highlighted the most important points. And, again kudos to Brian for getting us more info on this unusual video.

Care to tell us what YOU think about the Yale video? Post a comment!

It looks like lip synching is the new black in college online videos (or is it that I really like lipdubs and feel compelled to post about any new one I stumbled upon?)

I watch this very well produced online video after Dale Keiger, Associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine, posted about it on the CUE listserv.

Published on YouTube on December 21st, 2009, it has more than 22,000 views at the time of this writing.

It’s a really great high-energy-feel-good video including an original soundtrack recorded by students and adapted from the song “I Thank You” written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter as well as some dancing and much more.

So, please take 3 minutes and a half to watch this video.

Targeted to donors, this video was created and produced by Jay Corey, director of Video Strategy at Johns Hopkins University. As soon as I finished watching his video, I emailed him to ask a few questions about what it took to produce these 3 and half minutes of great online video.

1) How long did it take to write, direct and produce this video?

The ideal situation would have been to have a least 6 months to work on this piece. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the
turn-around time to complete this video was tight. The idea of Johns Hopkins University doing an end-of-year video was first introduced at the end of October 09. The only guidance that came with the idea was that the video should be fun to watch and have a “thank you” theme.

From concept to finished produced piece it took about 5 weeks. I started with the music, first by re-working the lyrics to make them more academic themed and then recording a basic rhythm track with guitar, drums, bass and a scratch vocal with my audio production partner David Schmelick. I then added keyboards, a horn section featuring students from the Peabody Institute and finally polished vocals provided by the Johns Hopkins acapella group Octopodes.

From there it was just a matter of logistics. I worked with several driven colleagues who worked tirelessly to keep me running from place to place, rapidly taping and cajoling, for the most part non-dancers and non-singers to perform as if they were.

2) This video uses the technique of the lipdub, a genre recently made popular by students lip synching while showcasing their campus. Why did you choose this technique?

As far as using a lip dub / lip synching technique, once we decided to make a music video, I don’t know of another way to do it. I chose the Sam and Dave tune I Thank You because it obviously fit the theme and because an R&B song would have relevance to largest group of viewers/listeners.

3) How did you secure the rights to use the song? Was it a long process?

In securing the music rights my colleague Glenn Simmons did an amazing job. This process can often be a difficult and lengthy one. By working through a music agent he was able to negotiate a workable rate and finalize a contract with the publishers in less than 2 weeks. Usage rates are fluid and vary greatly depending on the popularity of the song, how it will be used, where it will be seen, etc.

Have you watched “Reading Season, The Musical” yet?

This YouTube video was brought to my attention yesterday over Twitter via a quick post from TargetX Jeff Kallay.

As you’ve probably noticed, I always try to keep an eye on online videos produced in higher ed.
So, I watched it and immediately felt compelled to share it over Twitter:

Twitter / karinejoly: Wow, Udel has some real talent in the Admissions Office

This morning, I even got an email from a reader of the Higher Ed Experts newsletter who felt the same way and shared the link to this video.

It’s fun, under-5-minute long and is a great behind-the-scene look at the work done in an Admissions office at this time of the year – which is probably why it’s resonating so much within the community with more than 3,000 views on YouTube at the time of this writing.

That’s why I emailed Avi Amon, the UDel Admissions Counselor behind this video to ask a few questions about it.

1) Why did you decide to create this video? What is its target audience?

It’s an idea I’ve been toying around with for awhile, honestly. It’s always been a dream of mine to pursue composition full-time and/or write musical theater. I’m currently taking composition classes at Delaware in addition to working full time. I figured that creating this video was a perfect way to combine these segments of my life! My colleage and co-lyricist/performer, Drew, was an immeasurable help during the whole process.

While the primary target audience is definitely other college admissions counselors and high school guidance counselors, I think the humor and concept is broadly appealing. Students and parents have also left us very wonderful comments!

2) How did you produce it? How long did it take?

We actually have quite a bit of A/V equipment in our office for other marketing purposes. We’re in the process of making videos for all of our majors on campus to better educate and engage prospective (and undecided) students. I’ve learned that the key to good video is good audio, so we took care of that in my roommate’s mini-recording studio (which happens to be in our living room!) The video was shot on one of the office’s HD cameras and we edited it all down using Final Cut Pro at the University of Delaware Library. It took a weekend to plan, shoot, edit, and execute.

3) Was it a side project or something meant to be part of UDel recruitment strategy?

Definitely a side project. Drew and I had to come up with a short activity for our annual staff retreat and this is what happened! That being said, if the project continues – which I plan on – and other videos are made, it could definitely be used as a part of a grander University of Delaware recruitment push.

4) What kind of feedback did you get so far?

People have been LOVING it! And not just on campus either. It’s received some national attention from NACAC, TargetX, and plenty of other admissions offices around the country. We’re at 3000 hits and it’s only been 3 days since we published it!

I also think that the recent success of Glee (one of my favorite shows on TV) on FOX has contributed to our viewership. America is a very ‘musical’ place right now so it seems like the right climate for a project like this.

My latest UB column is now available in the November/December issue as well as online: “How to YouTube with Success: Six tips for optimizing online videos”

Here are the 6 tips:
1. Get listed on YouTube EDU.
2. Make videos that are easy to share.
3. Choose keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and tags for the videos.
4. Produce context-rich videos.
5. Don’t ignore your most fervent video fans—and critics.
6. Add closed-captioning.

University Business: How to YouTube with Success

I wrote this column a couple of months ago, after writing this post on how closed captioning can make a big difference but long before YouTube made an important announcement about new features using speech recognition on November 19: auto-timing and auto-captions.

Auto-timing will automatically synchronize your text-transcript with your videos.

Auto-caps will do ALL the work and is already used by several institutions such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, etc.

You can find out more about these features by watching this video from YouTube:

BTW, if you are a University Business reader who has just discovered collegewebeditor.com, welcome! Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog via RSS or email.

This year, several institutions have chosen to produce special videos to welcome freshmen on campus.

I’ve already written about “It’s Your Turn” from Missouri S&T, but today I’d like to share the video from Imperial College London in the UK.

At 3 minutes and 36 seconds, this video does a great job at presenting the institution, its history (that part actually is reminiscent of Missouri S&T video’s treatment), its academic programs, facilities and even main research projects.

So, just take the time to watch it, it’s really worth it.

This video was created and produced by Pamela Agar’s team at Imperial College. Pamela and her team members answered the following questions to give you a behind-the-scenes look.

1) What are the goal and target audience of this video? Why did you choose a video to reach this target audience?

At the start of each academic year, all new students attend presentations on their first day where senior staff and student representatives welcome them to Imperial and introduce the College. The staff involved in these presentations felt that they could be more fun and engaging, and so we were asked to produce a short film to open the presentations in an informative but unusual way.

We didn’t need to “sell” Imperial’s facilities to this audience of Freshers (Karine’s note: freshmen as we would say in the US) – they’ve already made the decision to come. So the film was much more about instilling a feeling of pride in our new students. We wanted to grab their attention and make them feel excited about the institution they are now part of. The scope of the film was vast – we were asked to try and cover the College’s history, past and present achievements and what new students can expect – all in less than four minutes! But using video and animation meant we could cover a lot visually as well as using the script.

2) How long did it take you to produce the video from start to finish? Can you describe a bit what kind of effort went into it?

From start to finish, we produced this in 2 weeks. After several initial brainstorms about how to approach the project, it took a couple of days to write and rewrite the script until it was short enough, without losing the desired content and messages. We also spent a day lining up the locations on campus, writing up the filming schedule and ensuring we had three students to star in the films – we used students in the College’s drama society. The film shoot itself took 1 day, and the video production team of two spent 3-4 days in post production. Our web designer developed the intro and in-video gfx and sound over 5-6 days.

In all, five people worked on the project – although not full time over the two weeks.

3) What tools (software, camera, etc.) did you use to create this video?

For the film elements, we used a Sony DVCAM and edited using Media100. Our web designer produced the graphics in Photoshop and Illustrator. The animations were programmed in Flash, exported as mov with embedded alpha channel. The “large” animation of the zooming map was done in After Effects. Sounds were then edited in WaveLab. All elements were assembled in Premiere and exported as one large mov.

4) Any interesting lessons learned in this project you’d like to share with the community?

I asked around the team about this question and one thing they said was that they found that Flash is a great tool for programming animations. The code can be easily re-used for any kind of object which in turn speeds up the production process when having to create loads of animations that follow the same pattern. And a technical thing they reported was that exporting from Flash with embedded alpha channel only works if the file format is QuickTime.

On a more general level, my (very obvious) lesson is don’t leave things to the last minute! We had a very busy summer producing a number of other projects, so left producing this Start of Session video until just a couple of weeks before the deadline. Leaving it until during the Summer vacation also meant it was harder to find students to star in the film as most were away from campus – we were very lucky we managed to find a great trio.

We didn’t leave much contingency time in case things went wrong, and so when our web designer came down with flu just as he was about to start work on the graphics almost ruined the project. Thankfully he managed to complete the project from his sick bed – that’s dedication!

Two days ago, I had the chance to attend the rehearsal of the webinar Glenda Sims will present on September 16: ADA-Compliant Web Videos 101: How to produce and publish online videos accessible to people with disabilities

Glenda is a true accessibility champion. Her presentation does a great job at providing the reasons why accessible online videos are important and how easy it can be to provide closed captioning.

Lately, I’ve been browsing some of the YouTube channels listed on the YouTube EDU portal, and out of the 40 I’ve reviewed up until now, only 2 or 3 offer videos with closed captioning.

It looks like closed captioning isn’t very high on the priority list of higher ed institutions with a presence on YouTube.

And, then I found this video from Gallaudet University, Graduation Day 2009.

Please just take 2 minutes to watch it to find out how closed captioning can make a big difference in online videos:

So?
Did you understand a thing of what was said?
Probably not unless you’re fluent in sign language.

Now, watch it again but don’t forget to turn on closed captioning (CC) as shown on the screenshot below – on the bottom left right side of the YouTube browser.

Makes a huge difference, doesn’t it?

Well, the difference will be the same when people who are deaf, not very fluent in English or in a very noisy (or too quiet to turn the audio on) environment watch your own videos — with closed captioning that is.

Do YOU provide closed captioning? Why? Why not?