MIT Cable Television is now providing live television broadcasts on the web of lectures, seminars and special events, the Center for Advanced Educational Services (CAES) has announced. Six-week Professional Education courses from MIT are also now on the web.
Programs scheduled for Channel 8 (one of the Institute's six campus cable channels) are available on StreaMIT, MIT's cable channel on the web. Among the web-based TV offerings are the popular EECS Colloquium Series. The new programming -- with schedule of upcoming programs -- can be seen on the MIT Cable Television web site.
On March 26, StreaMIT featured an MIT student team's NASA flight on a modified KC-135 (the "vomit comet") in real-time broadcasting over the MIT network to the web. The undergraduates in the Reduced Gravity Flight Opportunities Program studied the effects of weightlessness on scientific experiments in the modified 707 airplane.
The MIT Student Cable Group (SCG) also operates an Internet television station.
"The use of these new technologies makes our Cambridge campus accessible to people anywhere in the world." said Richard Larson, director of CAES and professor of electrical engineering. "We are proud to play a part in advancing MIT content delivery on a global scale, reaching especially our 80,000 MIT alumni/ae worldwide."
Representing the MIT Alumni Association, Jorge E. Rodriguez said, "Many of our alumni/ae have said that they want to feel that they are more connected to MIT, even though they may be far away. This new service is one way to keep them connected with what is going on at the Institute. And the technical content of the presentations can keep all of us -- MIT alumni and others -- up to date in breaking technical news in our respective fields."
SIX-WEEK COURSES
Through a strategic alliance among CAES, PBS's Business Channel and broadcast.com, six-week MIT certificate courses can be taken by business professionals worldwide in a time-asynchronous manner via the web. The Business Channel is the nation's leading provider of distance learning resources to corporate America. And broadcast.com is the nation's leading aggregator and broadcaster of streaming media programming on the Internet.
The first two courses to be offered in this mode are "Internet Commerce" by Professor Steve Lerman and "Use of Information Technology in Project Management" by Professor Feniosky Pe�a-Mora. These courses are first delivered direct to workplaces live via satellite on PBS's The Business Channel, originating from the TV studio of CAES in Building 9. Then the contents are digitized, broken up into shorter viewable segments and time-synchronized with visuals used by faculty, then made available on demand over the web.
Students thus have the opportunity to take these courses in two ways: live via satellite delivered to a television or delivered at their convenience to their computer over the web. They can also participate in chat rooms, bulletin boards and online quizzes to earn career-enhancing certificates and continuing education credits from MIT.
Three more Professional Education courses from CAES -- Optimizing the Supply Chain, Revenue Management and Advanced Internet Commerce -- are also scheduled for on-demand online delivery via the Internet in 1999.
A version of this article appeared in the April 7, 1999 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 43, Number 25).
