WELCOME to YouTube university, where there's no need to physically attend lectures: with a few mouse clicks, the lessons come to you.
Macquarie University has just spent millions of dollars upgrading its computer network to handle the explosion of video content, and is investigating how lectures can be posted on YouTube.
The university already manages a large amount of audio traffic that travels through the network.
"An audio stream is created for every lecture and made available to students on the same day - either on our internal network or on the internet," Peter Hole, Macquarie University infrastructure services manager, said.
About 100 audio recordings are done per day, he said. Students can access a streaming audio feed or download the entire lecture.
"We're looking to expand that to have more video content. There's limited PowerPoint-type content that goes with the audio stream at the moment so we're looking to put far more visual content with it (audio)," Mr Hole said.
The university established its own
channel on YouTube last year mainly to market itself to potential students.
Placing videos of lectures on YouTube is something the varsity is working on but two issues need to be resolved beforehand.
"We can't just point the camera at the lecturer and upload the lesson. The back of a lecturer's head isn't necessarily the thing you want to be watching ... we have to be more creative.
"There's also the question of copyright for when the lecturer shows a video as part of the lecture ... it's fine for us to show that on campus but we have to be careful if it's on the internet and if someone downloads it," Mr Hole said.
The university roped in Nortel Networks for its network upgrade, paying the supplier a "seven-digit-sum" to replace old Cisco gear, he said.
