What does this infrastructure do?

The Problem:

Utah's K-12 teachers and Higher Education faculty need a secure, efficient way to share with students digital educational resources such as videos, electronic textbooks, open educational resources and teacher's own content. Current methods for managing these resources are -

• Expensive: Campuses and schools who recognize the critical need are straining to pay institutional licenses for local solutions.
• Inefficient: Many resources are duplicated - redundant systems are created and maintained, placing a large burden on IT staff and burdening the system with inefficiency.
• Dangerous: Educators often turn to various solutions on the web where they may be in violation of copyright or exposed to intellectual property theft.
• Inaccessible: YouTube and Vimeo are blocked by many school districts and do not secure intellectual property or allow limited sharing.

Proposed Infrastructure
Leverages open resources and prior state investments

 

 

The Solution:

UEN proposes to leverage projects already underway on several campuses to create a single cloudhosted repository that allows educators to create, share, and find multimedia instructional resources. This statewide media ecosystem builds on existing investments like Canvas LMS and system-wide knowledge.

The Benefits:

• It saves Utah money: A statewide solution relieves UEN partners of the burden of institutional pricing for solutions licensed locally. (View Cost Savings)
• It is more efficient: The learning content management system provides access to open educational resources, reducing duplication and making it easier to incorporate resources into courses built in Canvas.
• State Initiatives require an updated media infrastructure: Initiatives such as the Technology Intensive Concurrent Enrollment (TICE) courses and the use of electronic textbooks in K-12 require a shared media infrastructure.
• Copyrights can be protected: With a learning content management system, the owner of the digital resource can choose whether to limit access or share under Creative Commons licensing. Easier access to open or cleared resources enables, rather than restricts, media use for instruction.
• It builds on existing systems: Higher education faculty would access via Canvas and K-12 teachers would use their my.uen page.
• Students can use a range of devices: With a video management system to efficiently encode media in various renditions, users can access videos from either desktop or mobile devices - one encode rather than multiple, saves staff time and resources.
• Stakeholders support this plan: Requests for this infrastructure have come from our partner institutions and stakeholders. UEN's partners recognize the great synergy and solution that a statewide learning content management system would provide.