The HBS Video Showcase makes it easy for faculty to bring cases to life. They can embed video into online cases or assignments, build custom video libraries specific to their courses, and store video clips for use later in the classroom. Users can visit the video library from anywhere in the world to view video storyboards, play videos, and search online video (and more than 7,000 videotapes) for spoken words or phrases.
Video and multimedia have a powerful impact on teaching and learning at HBS. Video interviews bring case studies alive, adding faces, attitudes, and emotions to the cold hard facts of a case. Video deepens the learning experience by bringing marketing materials, location tours and original documentaries to our students. In the classroom, faculty access thousands of on-demand DVD-quality streaming video clips for use in their curriculum. Beyond academics, online video builds community by making the dozens of guest speakers, newsworthy events and special campus presentations available 24/7 to HBS students, faculty and alumni.
The VideoTools system forms the heart of HBS' vast online streaming video library. VideoTools is a digital media portal via all of the school's video assets are managed, shared, and published. VideoTools portal pages provide ordered, branded collections of video content for classroom delivery, special events, or course video compilations.
Members of the HBS community can search the video library, querying on common criteria, such as video titles, related faculty, or event locations and dates. Every video is cross-referenced to the faculty, courses and cases it relates to. What's more, each video has a searchable transcript, making the video library fertile ground for advanced searches and serendipitous discoveries. Even the text appearing in synchronized Powerpoint slides becomes searchable in VideoTools.
Since every video has a direct URL, faculty can easily link to any video in an email, the Course Platform, or any web page. Whenever a video is requested, VideoTools enforces access-control rules to confirm that the user should be allowed access to the content.
VideoTools also enables HBS faculty and staff to create personal collections of video and multimedia content. After filling a personal folder with favorite video content, a user can share that folder to other people or groups, who now have full access to the collection. For example, a collection might contain all of the videos asssociated with a recent faculty symposium. That, or any, collection can be published to a new public-facing or access-controlled portal page simply by associating it with a portal template, which gets its own, direct URL.
VideoTools manages terabytes of content in various formats, (including MPEG1, MPEG2 and RealVideo), which resides on a redundant cluster of Helix Universal Servers. Like most HBS applications, the VideoTools application was created with a three-tier J2EE architecture.
