Cdigix & Clabs Overview

Chuck Powell

Director, Academic Media & Technology, ITS

Yale University

Charles.Powell@Yale.edu

May 11, 2005

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What We Set Out to Do

• First, to determine whether Cdigix could add value to the process of delivering educational materials to students over the campus network (primarily video). Several units on campus, including ITS, were already performing this function (for example classes.yale.edu) but the goal was to make it easier and more cost effective for the institution.

• Second, to provide optional subscription entertainment services to students (and faculty and staff as appropriate). This would include both music and video offerings. This part of the pilot would gauge student response to the service both at the technical level and for general sufficiency.

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Why These Goals?

• Internal initiative for efficiency on the educational side – deliver more media at a lower unit cost, make the process a simple turnkey process for faculty– Reduce demand for traditional media delivery methods such as the

evening screening

– Meet growing demands for media usage and teaching benefits

• Secondary benefit of encouraging students to do the right thing with regards to intellectual property and test whether “you can compete with free”– Immature market and models but important to test

– Test needs to reflect behavior -- not just what students say they would do

– Avoid equity and distribution challenges in a heterogeneous population

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Key Features

• Educational services had to be available to all students, entertainment services should be available to all

• Easy for faculty to make use of the service• Tight integration with campus infrastructure for

authentication, authorization, privacy, and course rosters

• Preserve campus internet connection bandwidth

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Results to date

• Educational piece (Clabs) a success with explosive growth from semester to semester and some growing pains

• Low “take rate” but mild growth.

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Some Details -- Technology

• Cdigix is integrated with Yale’s Central Authentication System (http://www.yale.edu/tp/cas), Shibboleth is also an option

• Cdigix servers are in our machine room(s) but solely owned, operated and serviced by Cdigix

• Educational services (Clabs) are delivered via any modern browser and Realplayer to Windows, Mac and soon Unix/Linux.

• Local feeds from Banner and our course management system to keep course rosters for access synched.

• Clabs currently has no “catalog” of educational materials we provide the materials locally from the Film Study Center or Library

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Some Details -- Financial

• Services (educational and entertainment) are separately priced

• Educational services paid for out of “my” GA budget so no cost to students and faculty.– Exact cost under non-disclosure– We’re satisfied that it’s cheaper than I can buy the hardware,

software and staff it myself

• Music monthly subscription cost = $2.95• Music permanent download = $.89

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Some Details -- Usage

• Clabs service used by ~85 faculty & ~1700 students last semester

• Over 400 hours of material• Estimate is we’ll grow at least another 30% next

semester• Video entertainment (Cflix) content has been limited

so far leading to low usage

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Some Details -- Outcomes

• Students and faculty have been very receptive to the educational components

• Several faculty have provided strong anecdotal evidence of the value to teaching and learning

• Students appreciate the “ease of use” and the asynchronous & ubiquitous nature of the service. It’s bound neither by traditional hours nor traditional network topology

• Biggest complaints and service issues to date:– Real is “better” on Windows than it is on Mac– Older computer hardware is challenged in a variety of ways

to “keep up” (we provide general purpose computer labs)

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Lessons Learned

• Cdigix is a young company, very flexible but with growing pains• We’re close to accomplishing our goal of being able to call the

educational service a complete “turnkey” solution for our needs• We think Ctrax and Cflix are great entertainment choices for our

students but the jury is still out on:– How the overall market will shake out and evolve

– Student adoption rate (real behavioral evidence needed)

– Impact (if any) on inappropriate file-sharing

• It’s definitely caveat emptor out there with the vendors– Clearly they are each staking out their niche(s)

– Don’t expect the answer you get from a vendor as necessarily the same as what another school would get

– Answers are changing almost daily even from the same vendor