10K and Growing

Sometime during the early evening of 20 September 2012, ICTP's automated recording system quietly reached a milestone: it added the 10,000th hour of video recording to its archive of ICTP Postgraduate Diploma Programme courses.

The online courses archive of physics and mathematics lectures, accrued over the past five years, is available for free on the Centre's ictp.tv website. The courses are captured using the EyA technology developed by ICTP's Science Dissemination Unit (SDU). EyA is an innovative, automated audio/video/slide recording system, developed by SDU to archive and share scientific lectures and talks carried out using digital presentations (PPT, PDF, animations, etc.) and especially traditional chalkboards found in classrooms.

"It is rewarding to see how a simple idea has helped ICTP in its mandate to support scientists and scholars around the world, producing lots of benefits for many," said SDU Coordinator Enrique Canessa.

He described the EyA system as robust, low maintenance and low cost, with the price of a recorded hour totalling less than a cup of coffee. He credits SDU staff Carlo Fonda and Marco Zennaro for providing crucial expertise in the implementation and updating of the system.

EyA is an attractive product for other institutes that want to carry out affordable, automated recordings of lectures, conferences or other educational activities. To that end, SDU has developed an "openEyA" system that institutes can easily set up in their own classrooms. In October SDU will hold its first openEyA users meeting where participants from South America and Europe will gather to discuss and exchange experiences on the use of openEyA and its future developments.

These future developments include producing free educational video lectures delivered in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as the development of an algorithm to certify "virtual attendance" and increase students' attention by requiring them to identify embedded audio codes while viewing EyA lectures.

To attract a younger, more technologically savvy audience, SDU will soon deploy free EyA-inspired Apps for mobile devices (tablets, smartphones with Android and iOS). "We want to open the universe of science to a new generation of learners and offer them inspiration and on-demand access to knowledge according to modern times," explained Canessa.