Sustainable Access Grid Recordings

Overview

This project aims to move the MAGIC Mathematics lecture recordings from the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 academic years from the at risk CREW repository to the MAGIC website, with a backup held in the JORUM repository service.

The CREW repository can no longer be used for this purpose as it is currently being held on development servers which are to be repurposed for further development projects. Additionally, the staff maintaining these servers are software engineers who are concentrating on other work, and so are only maintaining the servers and service on a best-efforts basis.

The MAGIC lecture recordings are a valuable resource of around 900 postgraduate mathematics lectures which are usable by students who were unable to attend the lectures, or who wish to review past material, and also by students at institutions out with MAGIC, who would not otherwise be able to see the lectures. In addition, they can be used by the lecturers themselves to review their lecture style.

Although the primary aim of this project is to make this repository sustainable, including a transfer and hand-over documents to the new servers; the work will also generate reports and scripts that can be used by other users recording lectures, and in particular, by users of the upcoming recording service for Access Grid managed by the JANET Access Grid Support Centre. This new service will allow users access to the recordings for a period of only two weeks during which they must download it and then host it on their own site. The success of this project will therefore enable the success of a range of distance learning systems based upon video lecture series.

Details can be found at: 
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/sustainingatriskonlineresources/sustainedmagic.aspx

From JISCs Sustaining 'at risk' online resources: Projects to transition “at risk” resources to new sustainability models to ensure their on-going availability and use and to build up sustainability case studies and practice for others to learn from.