Day 26–Practical choices for playback of flipped classroom videos on a Windows 8 Tablet
A Windows 8 Tablet for Teaching and Learning - Day 26
Sunday, December 30, 2012
We are living in amazing times. It is now possible for anyone to have access to world-class educational materials at the click of the mouse, or in the case of the new Windows 8 tablets, at the touch of the screen. The educational materials delivered over the Internet now take many forms including web pages, ebooks, PDFs, audio, and increasingly video.
The flipped classroom is all the rage in many education circles right now and a large part of the flipped classroom is assigning videos for students to watch, but how will they watch them? How will you get the video content so it is accessible to all students, even those without Internet access at home?
I spent much of the day watching video training materials in the MP4 format on my tablet that I had previously downloaded to my Desktop PC. It is time for me to once again sing the praises of the full-size USB port that is available on the Samsung Ativ Smart PC 500T.
The cloud is a great place when it works but you are often limited by the bandwidth capacity available to you. If the Internet is slow or not working at all, the shine quickly wears off cloud-based computing. I could have uploaded the videos to my Skydrive account and then downloaded them to the local storage on my Windows 8 Tablet but I probably would still be waiting for all of the uploads and downloads to finish sometime next week. There was a faster way.
Don’t believe me? I live in the practical world of making technology work to improve the teaching and learning process for students. I am always thinking about scale, how to scale something up to make it work for a class or 30 students, or a university of 10,000 students. Sure, anyone can come up with a project that will work for an individual, but how will it scale? Let me provide an example.
Today I copied over six videos that were previously on my Desktop PC to a USB thumb drive. Each file was a MP4 video of about two hours in length. The average file size was 2GB each so I had about 12 GB in total for about 12 hours of video. Roughly about 1GB in file size for each hour of video content. Do you see the problem?
Many families have data plans that have a bandwidth cap of 5GB per month. So today, if I had downloaded the files over a metered network connection I would have gone over my data cap by a factor of 2 in just one day, not good, and potentially expensive as there are overage charges. And that was just me, multiply that by 30 and you can see the network tubes clogging before your very eyes. USB thumb drives are inexpensive, a 16GB USB drive now costs approximately $10 each. For about $300 you could have one for each student in the class. A USB thumb drive gives the student the flexibility to use the USB drive on their computer/laptop at home, or on a tablet if it has a USB port like the Ativ 500T.
To get around some of the long download times many videos are available via streaming services like YouTube and TeacherTube that deliver the files on an as needed basis bit by bit. This prevents the delay of downloading the entire file before you can watch it. You still need to be aware of bandwidth caps and the fact that the more users you have watching a video over the network at any one time the slower the experience will become for everyone. If you watch a video multiple times, every time you re-watch it, it will continue to add to your total data usage for the month.
I think we will be living in the hybrid world in the near future of using both online cloud resources where it makes sense and using local storage and processing as a necessary fall back in cases where the “way of the cloud” is slow or not available. The Skydrive application is a great example of this allowing for files to be stored locally and synced up to the cloud so that multiple devices can have access to cloud storage.
But there is also a major flaw in the hype around cloud-based computing and storage, bandwidth caps. The cloud is often times limited by bandwidth caps here in America and even as we make great progress with new computer hardware and software the network is becoming the weak link. This is particular true in rural areas of Illinois where many families lack affordable broadband access. Watching flipped videos is simply not an option to many students in our local area due to lack of affordable broadband access at home.
My Ativ 500T tablet uses USB 2.0 which has a transfer rate of 480Mbps. This is great as it provides me the capability of copying large files to a USB thumb drive and plugging it into my Windows 8 Tablet and play directly off the USB drive. More improvements are on the way in the Windows 8 Tablet space. The new Microsoft Surface Pro Tablet coming out in January uses USB 3.0 which is capable of copying files at 5Gbps. That is approximately a 10 fold increase in performance. If you are doing a lot of content transfer of large file sizes you might want to consider the new USB 3.0 capability on new 64bit Windows 8 tablets now available. I do not mean to bore you with the details but just want to make you aware that from a practical perspective you need to be thinking about the logistics of moving large files around for students to access.
Watching the videos from the USB thumb drive worked great and I have watched two of the six videos today. Using a USB thumb drive is very convenient and I can constantly copy new content onto the removable USB drive or get multiple drives to save content different types to each USB stick.
Keep on Learning,
Dr. Grissom
Dr. Grissom
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
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