An innovative approach to webcasting

27 November 2009

Filming

The Future of Humanity Institute and the Programme on the Ethics of the New Biosciences have collaborated together to produce an innovative new media player, integrating background and supplemental media (such as slides, academic papers and digital footnotes) into webcasts of recent lectures.

This media player is the first project to arise from the School's new Collaboration Fund, which allocates extra resources to help our Institutes work together on special projects. One of the key aims of the School is to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and it is hoped that the Collaboration Fund will facilitate many more joint projects among its Institutes.

The aim of the enhanced media player is to deliver lectures in a much more interesting way. Digital footnotes appear allowing the viewer to access relevant supplementary material (abstracts, charts, articles etc.) and expandable slides are synchronized with the talk. A timeline also allows the viewer to jump easily between sections of the talk and provides an overview of the lecture content. The Institutes hope to produce more of these multi-media video lectures, with the aim of introducing their research to a lay audience.

You can see the new media player in action in these two videos:

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