In the fall of 2008, ERAC undertook a teacher review of the four leading video streaming services currently marketing to Canada’s education system:
There are a number of other services in various stages of market entry in BC.) The consortium ran the review from the perspective of a BC district, school and teacher so that the findings would be relevant to its membership.
ERAC’s review team of five educators included expertise ranging from elementary to secondary:
Team members spent one day listening to presentations by each of the four vendors, followed by question-and-answer sessions. Then, they spent about a week familiarizing themselves with the services. Finally, they gathered for a second day where they tried out the services and discussed the material as a group. They created a chart outlining what they viewed as the strengths and weaknesses of the four services. They also collectively finalized their summary reports for each video streaming service.
Their findings are presented in this report, as outlined in detail in the Content, Usability and Technical Overview sections. These sections also include information supplied by the vendors; the material is clearly marked as having been supplied by the reviewers or the vendors.
ERAC also brought together a focus group of teachers from around BC who have benefited from the use of video streaming to discuss how they became interested in video streaming, how it was implemented in their school, how video streaming was integrated into the curriculum, the student and teacher response to video streaming and what they saw as the future for video streaming in their school. The experiences of four of these teachers are presented in the section, Sample School Experiences with Video Streaming.
