Presentations and Discussion (edited)

 

(Rod Bishop)              “I would like to introduce John Bird who is going to give the keynote address to this conference.  John is a 34-year veteran of arts education in Australia.  His career spans the teaching of film, television animation, computer animation, interactive media and online media.  In 1966 he became a foundation staff member at the first film and television school in Australia, instigating and developing the first post graduate program in film, television and animation.  In 1984 he became the director and manager of the Computer Animation Centre, an industry and government funded research, development and training program in computer animation, computer graphics and publishing.

 

“In 1992 he established, AIM, the Animation and Interactive Multimedia Centre, the first post-graduate program of its type in Australia.  In 1996 this program had grown into a major centre for the new media, offering graduate diploma, masters and doctoral qualifications.  Once again, a first in Australia. 

 

“John is now an adjunct professor at RMIT University in Melbourne and a visiting professor at Monash University Centre for Telecommunications and Information Engineering.  He has become one of Australia's leading experts in online media and online delivery. RMIT has recognised John's contribution to the field by establishing the John Bird Award for Excellence in Online Production. While it's easy to summarise John's career like this, with an impressive but nevertheless dry and impersonal resume, it does not convey the many battles that John has fought during his three decades in film and television education.

 

“Fifteen years ago when the first Apple Mac began to suggest the potential for digital production in film and television training, John became an outspoken advocate of this new technology but it did not necessarily win him any friends.  In fact, many of his colleagues were quite openly hostile.  John held to his line and kept boldly prophesying that a brave new world for film and television production and distributed learning would eventuate.

 

“When John began publicly speaking about the potential of convergence and the possibilities of online Multimedia as a new era for film and television education, many thought he was crazy.  Many of us still do.  Perhaps not for the same reasons.  The former head of the Centro de Capacitacion Cinematografica in Mexico and former president of Cilect, Gustavo Montiel, tells his new students that they are the equivalent of Aztec warriors starting out on a life long battle to secure Mexican National Cinema.

 

“I don't know quite how this metaphor translates to Australia.  Kangaroo warriors or koala warriors don't quite have the same resonance but Americans might say, whatever, John is still a true warrior for his cause and it gives me great pleasure to present the keynote address for this conference.

 

(John Bird)     “This is my first visit to Los Angeles and I'm honoured to be in the presence of such talent and insight.  I will try and share some of my own.

 

“I would like you to think about where you may have been in 1969, specifically, October 1969.  At UCLA a computer was linked with a computer at Stanford Research.  This was the first link in the “Internet chain”. I guess most of us couldn’t imagine the start of that network would have any relevance whatsoever to the issues we're trying to grapple with at the moment.

 

“ I would ask you to think about the business card you've got in your pocket. On it is a physical address, a telephone number and possibly an e-mail or Internet address - the first step into the portal of your position in time and space, quite different from the geography of your residential or your professional address.  And there we begin the move from a physical environment into an interconnected global environment.

 

“The titles of the address of this conference have an emphasis upon learning but the flip side to this is teaching. Learning and communicating are the most mysterious aspects of the entire (human) processes, as anybody who has observed a child will know.

 

“Despite our access to global connections and some of the most sophisticated media, we shouldn't be disappointed if we can't put together all the connections at this conference, but rather, unzip some of the possibilities.  In his welcome, Rod referred to a point in the beginning of a computer animation period.  In the early 1960s computer scientists were looking at the process of computer animation and how they might make a contribution to it. 

 

“They tried to tackle the tedious and boring processes of the animator and failed because they did not identify that this role related to the artistic process. The process layer underneath animation was the one they should have tackled.  About 10 years later we saw the emergence of computerisation in animation, which did try to address the tasks which were debilitating (the animator) and taking the life out of the creative process. These were the Digital Paint Box and the digital animation systems we know today.

 

“I suffer from dyslexia so when I encountered a word processor for the first time it was absolutely liberating.  Here I could make mistakes and this enabled me to write in ways that I could never do before. 

“When a family illness forced me to work from home I had to find a way of transcending the geography. Online production and using the Internet became a necessity to try to manage a new and emergent department.  It was very difficult for my staff, but what it meant is that I traveled by train with a PowerBook on my knee, then plugged it in at home and made connections to them. 

 

“Distance education is not a new concept, yet each generation tries to come to grips with basically the same sorts of issues. Australia is a rather large landscape and in the 1930s they developed a communication process called the Tregear pedal wireless.  It was a large box that had foot pedals on it like a bicycle, which was a generator.

 

“That communication system enabled the Royal Australian Flying Doctor Service - people could carry it on pack horses, on camels and on cars where there are literally hundreds of miles of separation.  From that a radio system of education was developed. We cannot explore the future of learning at a distance without also exploring implications of what it means to teach at a distance.

 

“The infrastructure of the school being in a different time and space than the geographic school, also needs us to rethink it in terms of access of seven-days-a-week global time zones.  The Internet provides the prospect of global universal access, but so too it entails the bridging of other barriers, language and cultural and ethnic groupings.

 

“What has fundamentally changed during the last decade in the evolution of the motion picture medium is the move from analogue to digital production mode - the so-called interactive Multimedia era in which the creator and the audience can more directly engage.

 

“The Internet and broadcast television, as it moves into datacasting and to digital interaction television, are again on a rapidly convergent path.  For Australians, interactive television will be with us in about two-and-a-half years and film and television schools are being looked at for insights into leadership and research. 

 

“If we want to know about the future of our film, we will really have to sit down in the audience today, and listen and learn from them. In much the same way, if we want to understand distance learning we are going to have to sit in the audience as a learner at a distance.

 

“The politicians and many education administrators might see the adoption of on-line learning as an economic model. I don't think it will be for the next 10 or 15 years.  What really is the issue is the quality of the model.  How can we enhance the process, liberate ideas with different modes and approaches to it?

 

“One of my colleagues had worked for 32 years in the National Australia Broadcasting Commission. In the early 1990s he tried to influence the Commission to adopt the Internet in the design of what was to become the first of the digital studios in Melbourne at Southbank. In January 1996, he was told to give up because they wouldn’t do it.

 

“Three months later the ABC changed their mind and established ABC Online, which is now one of the major cultural doorways to Australia. My colleague developed the beginnings of this on his home computer.  The key point I want to make is that all of us are touching the edge of exploring a new medium.  Trying to find its artistic heart and trying to communicate with somebody else.

 

“It is a vaporous endeavor trying to give form to the invisible. In my view great teachers that give us insight, and the great experiences of life, are those that liberate us as learners to realise our own dreams.  So we really need to begin to dream. 

 

“The Dreamtime is something described by the Australian aboriginal community as being an integral part of their life.  A continuing part that dates back to the beginnings of time.  Daydreaming is in part the dreaming of futures.  Recently I joined a radio-controlled thermal soaring group and learnt something about trying to visualise the invisible.

 

“These master pilots began to talk to me about feeling the angel's kiss on the back of their neck and seeing and smelling the air. Then you watch them hang launch a glider from shoulder height, it begins to ascend and they coach it until it is a speck in the sky. And then to accelerate this speck and have it zoom down and whistle past you at 150 kilometres an hour before it ascends again, and then gently come to alight in your hand.

 

“These are the sorts of understandings of the medium we will have to try to deal with as we shape relationships with people - not wires or connections.  So we begin with dreams.  My granddaughter at four was very happily and confidently using my Mac and making animation programs and saying to me:  "Pa, what sound does an octopus make?" Going up to the microphone and gurgle, gurgle, gurgle and sync-ing sound to her animation programs.

 

“Only 10 years earlier I had received a government grant to try to put in place the first computer animation industry training programs in Australia.  That was in parallel to what was happening here in the States because we bought the gear from the States. My granddaughter is now eight and she and her colleagues from the local primary school are happily making and authoring web pages, and communicating with students across the globe. Where do they learn?

 

“In 1956 in Australia we had the Olympics in Melbourne.  That might not seem to have a great deal of connection to other things, but it also brought television.  Ten years later I encountered the first generation of students entering a university program, of which I was involved, who wanted to make films.

“I knew nothing about making films.  I was an illustrator, a graphic designer. We knew nothing about the process of making films but we were impelled by the fact that these students at 18, who had sat through the 1956 Olympics and television for the next 10 years, had acquired insights about a language that we did not know.  I was of the print era they were not.  It was an audacious aspiration, absolutely lunatic.

 

“We started, we said:  "We are going to have a film school."  We named it Moron Island and the students from the graphic design program transferred, and before we knew it the course had exploded. We had one Bolex and a Super 8 camera!  There were two young women in that group.  Jill Bilcock (then Stevenson) was the editor of Elizabeth and Romeo and Juliet.  The other was Gillian Armstrong who became the first really distinguished young female director with My Brilliant Career.

 

“So you never can quite tell the treasure trove of human potential that you have in your company.  About 10 years later there was another inflow and it came from within the industry itself.  They were in their thirties and forties and strangely they were drawn back.  And in part I could see this coming and I said:  "Okay, we won't run continuous undergraduate programs, we will just run a one-year course.  Come in, wherever you've come from, from whatever your discipline area is."  And so we had computer scientists, doctors, lawyers and theologians.

 

“I had two colleagues, who in 1973 set off on a ludicrous expedition to be the first white men to cross the Australian Simpson Desert.  Now the Simpson Desert is about the size of England, so it's not a short walk. About a week after they had set out Charles McCubbin's wife received a radio telegram through the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which is our main inland network, and it read:  "I have seen the desert bloom.  A flower garden the size of England.  Charles."

 

“Charles had witnessed one of the rare events in the Australian desert. It had rained and with it, a burst of life and flowering had arrived. So the desert was carpeted for hundreds of miles with flowers.  He described trees clad with a shimmering iridescent green of amazing green leaves that peeled away as they approached and reformed again on trees further away.  These were budgerigars (birds). 

 

“This is like the experiences I have of the web, that there is a rush of life occurring in this convergent process which is liberating a level of creativity I certainly haven't experienced before, across a wide range of interdisciplinary areas.  In some respects it seems only yesterday when surfing the net was something that ebullient boys do in their bedroom.  Today the board riders are those in business suits and in corporations.

 

“A decade or so back the two digit date code was an elegant, efficient line of code, today it is a monumental problem but it also gives us compelling insights into how globally interconnected and interdependent we are.  Around the world we have seen government planners looking at the shortfall which has occurred in the information technology sector.  One of the tragedies is that most of those reports are looking at information technology and not at the next step in the process. 

 

“We in film and television schools really now have to look at and prepare ourselves for the wave that is going to hit us within the next five years.  I predict that there will be an absolute explosion of demand upon film and television and all of the media or literate time based audio-visual art forms within this next five years.

 

“The developments are being impelled by other factors, the personal and the artistic.  The allure of a new medium.  The prospects of being an author and a publisher, and of having a global audience. This social shift of the lifelong learning embrace and the economic awakening that the real treasure if you are an investor, is not going to be in the manufacture of boxes, it is going to be in the ownership of the intellectual recipe book of content.

 

“I believe we are beginning to see the shift and the experience that this has happened before in the investment sector.  If this happened once before with film where it began to reprocess the theatrical arts and to try to record it and moved into its own domain, we saw it occur with television.  I think some in the investment sector are beginning to see that the content providers are much safer than dealing with the boxes and the wires.

 

“Some of this expansion may be taken up with the demand upon the education sector and commercial educational providers. In my view distance education or distance learning is inevitable.  It is not a question of will it be, it is going to be and I think we need to face what we can do with it.  Some of it may be driven by the economics of people becoming aware that if they can move the student or the staff member outside the school, and have them there with their own home studio, workstation, they can shift some of the responsibilities, economic responsibilities outside of the school.

 

“But it is also going to increase demand for specialist and skilled teaching staff.  We can't have a learning expansion without a consequential expansion in the teaching sector.  A useful model for what might be is the tourist industry.  The tourist economy is based upon destinations in geographic space.  The information economy is based on destinations in cyberspace.  The trick is how do you make your destination as exotic as The Great Barrier Reef, and then see the other support services fill in behind it.

 

“I was once asked to provide some level of Internet connection for a lady named Sue, who was dying of cystic fibrosis and was in hospital waiting for a double lung transplant.  Sue began to use the Internet and found out quite a lot of information, so she was able to contribute quite significantly to her own treatment and to the treatment of others. 

 

“So here we have a person who was suffering from an illness but is finding a way to make connections through a wider universe even though she can't speak very well.  It was Mother's Day and we got a call at 1.30 am. My wife answered and I could hear her saying:  "Of course, we'll pray, yes of course we'll pray love."  And she came back to the bedroom and said:  "That was Sue, they are preparing her for transplant and she wanted us to pray for her."

 

“We were really quite shaken. I felt compelled to send a message to Sue (on the e-mail), as I did every day, although I had already sent some that day.  It wasn't until I logged on that a message popped back in, that it hit me. Here was a message from Sue, which had been, time-dated a half-hour before she phoned. I realised that this girl who we'd never met had decided to ring us in that half-hour window when she was being prepared for a double lung transplant.

 

“Sue survived the operation and we met her for the first time and took her to the theatre in Melbourne.  But the issue really about connection is connection to somebody, and I guess this is the heart of the issue of learning. The process with Sue was entirely unexpected and how it occurred I don't know, but the learning game is a two-way process. 

 

“There is also another thing I would like to leave you with.  I experienced the beginnings of a very small film school and we were strapped for cash.  We got a 70-year-old man to be our storeman.  He knew nothing about film making.  George Grace worked in our store and stayed about 10 years. When George finally left we realised the tremendous human network George had played in the process of building a learning environment.  That fabric of connection was at a human level.  So what I am trying to leave here is that it isn’t always the wires, there are some elements in the process that are going to engage and need to engage the human network.

 

 “When I leave this conference and I'm going to Washington to see my brother. He has worked with some of the really bright minds in plasma physics and aerospace research and he wants me to be introduced to a brilliant young woman who he describes as the brightest and fastest learner he has ever encountered.

 

“According to him, this lady makes new discoveries every week.  A week or so back she discovered her toes.  She can now roll over on her tummy.  She is four months old.  In his late fifties my brother became a parent for the first time.  He has discovered that Katherine is not merely their baby daughter, she is a unique person.   So if you wish to really discover the nature of interactive learning in its most perfected and elegant form, you need to really look at that interaction between mother and child as they entrust their past and they share their futures.”

 

(Rod Bishop)             “This session is to discuss the issue of online activity in terms of evolving distributed learning.  The other issue to be discussed is the development of corroborative software tools for online film and television production, to enable teaching into remote locations.

 

“We will look at what sort of marketing models exist and how people feel about the pedagogical implications of online learning, whether it differs significantly from traditional learning, how you go about marketing it and what the markets might be. Most people agree this type of distributed learning for film and television schools really represents a series of different markets. 

 

“In this session, Nick De Martino, the Director of Strategic Strategy at the American Film Institute (AFI) will be discussing the assets it currently possesses for online delivery.  John Smithies from Cinemedia in Melbourne will be talking about content management for video on demand systems. John Bird will be discussing a specific project from RMIT, that is a computer animation project for web delivery to remote locations. Finally, Russ Naughton, also from Melbourne, will be talking about Radio Australia's online services.

 

(Mr De Martino)        “The AFI is an educational institution that is somewhat different to the others represented here.  Although we confer degrees, our activities extend beyond our educational mission.  We have film preservation efforts, we expand our technologies and we showcase excellence in film festivals and on television.

 

“Our formal training programs include The Centre for Advanced Film and Television Studies, which is our conservatory, degree-granting institution, currently accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. It is about to be accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which will positively impact on the degrees we offer and the students we are able to train.

 

“In addition, for many years we have offered extension courses in the conventional screenwriting, directing and producing in film and television. More recently we started courses in advanced technology.  Then there is the category that I call immersion workshops such as the Californian Digital Arts Workshop that offers the opportunity for fine artists, including filmmakers, to make a conversation in their current areas to the digital media. And the AFI Intel Enhanced Television where we are doing some of the things that were alluded to with reference to the digital environment for television. 

 

“Our fundamental model is not dissimilar to other conservatory-based institutions.  By this I mean students, whether they matriculate or not, come to the AFI to learn by application. The emphasis is on getting critiqued and making an actual work of art. We also continue the tradition of apprenticeship – studying with the masters.  

 

“The idea of distance education or learning is not a model that fits terribly well the AFI today. We have to see to what extent we can scale the model we currently have, versus doing a different model entirely.

 

“Certainly, like many of you, we have expertise in training.  We also have, and this is fairly critical for the online world, 30 years of assets that we own copyright title to. This includes lectures, films that our students have produced and television shows for the general public.

 

“Our current market is the professional market. This works well because we are located in Hollywood with proximity to the talent base. But we expect this to change with the Internet. Another market is faculties and instructors elsewhere, with the train-the-trainer model. 

 

“The K12 is a most fruitful and challenging area. With the low cost and universal access of available image production tools, educational institutions will have to adopt new measures because young people will learn to communicate differently than they currently do.  Literature is different as a result of these tools.  Literature is a broad term that I use to reference all of film culture and multimedia.

 

“Finally the public categories I have divided into cinefile (the general public) and youth.  We think they are a market who understand they need to experience and contextualise what came before, to understand the movies of today.  So what are some of the pieces of the puzzle?  First of all a huge part of it in the area we are currently engaged in at the AFI is converting the assets to IP based files, to the Internet protocol.

 

 “To make it valuable we need to develop acceptable tool sets that make the production easier than it currently is. We have to create interactive applications as well for learning and this is really a very sophisticated software development challenge.  That implies massive testing. Finally because we are talking about being on the Internet, we need to master it.  I don't think any of us, at least at AFI, have the answer to how to effectively market on the Internet, but we need to learn.

 

“ I want to say a word about platform and delivery options because it is not restricted to the Internet even though we believe that is the core of it.  First and foremost is television itself.  This is conventional broadcast television cable and digital broadband.

 

“I point to multi-point video, which can be done by either the satellite or IP network. This is an important model, because the master teacher that provides a vision of what is significant or important in a particular work of art is not available in other locations, and could be a tremendous value to a learning environment that is based on distance.

 

“Even though some of the video streaming technologies today seem a bit primitive, this is a very shortsighted observation. They are constantly improving and it's what we do with it that counts.  Having said that let's not forget CD-ROM and the DVD.  Hard media is not a bad thing to distribute these assets on, and there are also enormous opportunities for hybrid development between the DVD and the Internet.

 

“Also, text books will need rethinking because the server will be the text book.  A multi media server that allows you to combine text, graphic, animation, video, audio, is an enormous value, and it's also an enormous job to produce. Then finally, let us not ever forget the live-in-theatre experience of viewing the motion picture, such as the classic movie Citizen Kane that was made to be viewed in the theatre.

 

“We are an adopter of the advanced television enhancement forum standard, backed by content companies like Sony, Warner Bros and Disney, technology companies like Intel and Microsoft, and distribution companies like TCI and Discovery Networks. 

 

“AFI online, (www.afionline.org) began in 1994. It reflects all of the AFI programs that we run in the real world and in virtual method.  It also includes new content that is only available on the Internet, therefore making AFI an online publisher.  We think of it as basically a tool for general audience education, about film and television and digital media, and it is not yet curriculum based. 

 

“The AFI program content includes the catalogues and all of the class activity.  The professional training division is represented here. We can register online and this will be the expansion of a very ripe area for us. Since much of this is tool streaming for computer based learning, we expect that we will be able to expand this into actual courseware.

 

“The television studies’ materials online have served to be a very useful recruitment method. We have profiles of the Faculty and the courses that are offered as well as play excerpts from our filmmakers' work.

 

“AFI is also a membership organisation.  We have thousands of members nationwide and we routinely recruit new members online. We expect this will be the corner stone of a revised web activity because we think there are benefits we can offer uniquely online that we can't offer anywhere else. It gives us the ability to have a customer relationship with members of the public who are well informed of what we do professionally.

 

“I think it's safe to say the traditional hands-on model of cinema education used in the past will be difficult to scale, so we're going to be defining new targets.  This is a large undertaking.  We need new resources, new partners and new collaborators. Expanding the acceptance of screen language in other areas outside the professional training arena is a worthy but not simple goal. Finally, technology is an ally in all of this, because the technology companies want to see these applications flourish for their own enlightened, self-interest reasons, and the power of it is quite remarkable.” 

 

(John Smithies)           “The main issues we're presently dealing with include addressing linear video working for any digital file, and ways of managing interactive content. We're also addressing market segments with the Internet allowing us to go one-on-one.

 

“Content Management Federation Square is the precinct where we're building a new home, and there are a lot of technical issues about the network and serving video around that site. We are looking at what the global network means for collections and copyright management, particularly when you combine it with some form of intelligent distribution that tells you where the files are in the world and what's happening to them.

 

“We are all reasonably familiar with the role of copyrights and payments in this industry particularly with indigenous cultural material.  We looked at artists' rights across three main areas.  The legal rights, it's just establishing the bona fides of ownership.  If those rights are established up front then this can be documented from day one. Given that, the value of those rights needs to be addressed so that at any stage we've got an automatic calculation.  And moral rights is where information about the content can be stored and retrieved, particularly when you do have culturally sensitive material or there is a conflict over rights in some areas.

 

“Added to the complexity of digital environments, apart from any technical difficulties, dealing with digital files is very different to dealing with cans of film or videotape.  We certainly need to have flexibility to control the use of content and report usage to owners.  And what Swift aims to do is to capitalise on that low transaction cost by using Internet technologies, so that when copyright issues need to be addressed it doesn't have to involve people with managing in time somewhere else. It also gives us the ability to store and track complex data sets.

 

“This brings us to the questions relating to flexible conditions for content owners, and this applies to a feature film down to a short film.  If we can deliver this kind of usability then the production sector can go off in another direction.

 

“In most cases owners are attracted to a set of standard agreements, but where this changes is with for example, the solo person, such as a producer who has content they want to share with others, or other information.  Swift is able to deal with all the complexities of owners' rights and what they want done with the work.

 

“There are different pricing structures, and the owner nominates what they want to charge, as opposed to the middle person, who may be the distributor. Disbursement of returns is also accessible to the owner and calculations can be tracked over time.

 

“Then there's the general reporting and information.  As a content owner I want to see who’s done what with it, and when they've seen it.  A lot of valuable market information comes out of that and an owner can start to see what's been happening with the titles.

 

“The copyright management system is what Swift is.  It does the switching and the checking across these different databases and then there's a video server technology.

 

“To give you a rough ‘architecture’ picture.  There is the local content management system that sits on a box and your local video server.  As a client user I will find the work I want by connecting to the host catalogue.  I decide what I want to see and the copyright management system checks a), that I'm registered to use that content or get access to it, and b) that the content is available for that kind of usage.  It then knows how I receive it, and it goes to the mass storage side of the organisation and delivers it to the local server.

 

“Of course, once you send the file out of the network you get problems.  To solve that we're looking at encrypting the digital video, but we currently have a file out of the remote site, which we need to manage in some way. To get access to that you have to have a live Internet connection.  To go back out and get the key it's going to allow you to view it even on site. Once that's all checked off, the local server delivers it to the client.

 

“If you go to our website today, you would see it divided roughly into two parts.  The left-hand side is general information and the front is just there for viewing.  You don't have to be a member to search the catalogue.  You can look up documentaries and landscape, and come up with a very basic title listing and links. 

 

“They find a particular video, click on, and it just comes up in the normal catalogue entry, synopsis, production details and library of congress subject are headings. An increasing number of our members are using this information to book videos online.

 

“On the left hand side there is more personalised information.  These are titles that you have seen in the catalogue, which you bookmark for later reference. Another way you could search this is to just browse selections. But they are fairly basic browser buttons that have been established.”

 

(Ms Burns)     “According to a recent associated press article there are approximately 26,000 online courses available and approximately 750,000 students taking them. With that large number, it becomes a question of how you're going to teach those students.  

 

“One of the topics I am here to talk to you about is that (going online) can be done on a limited budget.

 

 “I'm going to take you through my website and show you how I teach online.  We live at a site called Artscribe and currently, I believe, we are the only UC Riverside class online, at an undergraduate level, where screen writing is taught one-on-one to the students on the internet.

 

“I'm going to take you through an advanced screenwriting class. What you are seeing now is WebBoard, which allows us to create mailboxes for our students and is interactive with Java.  We create an arena where we have a classroom and a place for each one of these students to live.

 

“We had one student who had to leave UC Riverside at the end of her first quarter.   She went back to San Francisco and entered UC Davis and, where they gave her permission to continue screenwriting through UC Riverside.  We therefore had our first inter-campus student, which means I was able to teach a student from another UC campus, and that is what I am aiming for.  I would like ultimately to be able to have students from every campus here in the state. Also, we can have a look at this student’s complete script, because of this WebBoard.

 

“Another critical success was with a student who took the class concurrently through UC Riverside's extension program.  The money the student paid in extension was $414.  Half of that money came directly into my department. I was able to teach Gail what I felt she needed to know and have kept her for the whole year, and hopefully by the time she finishes she will be a screenwriter.

 

“It's not likely you're going to get someone like this unless they can enrol through other avenues, and she's actually earning true UC units.  These units may have a x on them now, but if she uses them any other way they will not have a x in front of them.

 

“The final thing I want to show you is our virtual classroom.  If the server could handle it, we could have as many as 1000 students in the classroom at one time for a lecture.

 

            “We hope that WebBoard will eventually have whiteboards and other accessories.  Presently however, we can converse with students through ‘DragonSpeak’, which means that a student who cannot type fast can speak their text.

 

“Every student who comes into this classroom will be listed on the right hand side (of the screen).  It allows me to know when they come; when they go; when they get bumped off; whatever happens to them.

 

“How many times do we see students who cannot make a class, and yet the whole quarter's class has been kept for anyone who missed anything.  I have kept five-years’ worth of scripts.

 

“The other thing I like about teaching online is that we can post supplementary material and students can access it instantly.  So, if we want to teach them something about Casablanca we could put up a ‘beat sheet’ that takes them, one by one, through the film.

 

“My feeling is that we’re heading to a virtual university world in which, people from all over the country will be able to take my class and I'll be able to share my expertise.   Currently, I can do this online in a class of 10, 12, 15 students, and I guarantee you that I could do it as well as if I were standing up at this podium and doing it right now.  They're engaged; they don't leave the classroom and they have a lot of fun doing it this way.”

 

(Monty Hudson)         “My name is Monty Hudson from the Department of Entertainment Studies and Performing Arts, UCLA Extension Performance and Entertainment Centre. Distance learning and online learning has a lot of potential for us.  We're already geared to help educate the market that has geographic and time limitations, so these sorts of tools obviously can be of great service.

 

“The presentation from Ms Burns demonstrated very well the limitations that we're dealing with, but also the potential that we see. Most of the courses we started online were screen writing courses. These have a text-based subject matter, so they are very easy to do.

 

“We're not doing many other courses, mostly due to limitations in the tools. Our courses are run like a show because if it isn’t appealing and we can't engage the student; they won’t enroll and stay enrolled.  But we are in a very competitive environment and we've got to look at how we're going to transform our business in such a way that we don't become a thing of the past.

 

“We began by outsourcing our online courses with a start-up company called Online Learning.net. We're following and monitoring what we see happening with the delivery of entertainment content on the Internet, to see how we can develop this company. 

 

“In our consultations with advisors and industry people, it seems to be clear that the entertainment content on the Internet is going through the same developmental phase that television went through many years ago.

 

“Many people feel there's going to a new form of content development that becomes feasible and saleable on the Internet, and we will follow those models in distributing and delivering our education on the Internet.  We're also looking at other forms of distance learning such as video conferencing, linkages with other institutions, because we don’t want to limit our vision and approach to just online education.

 

(Mr Kobara)   “I wanted to talk to you about what we do at UCLA with online education.

 

“Online education is really in a growth mode right now but it's still very new.  I would say, particularly in the USA, every institution in North America has an online program right now.  And, the implementation of online education in your institution is very important. It has to be customised to the way you do education, the outcomes that you expect, the way you do admissions.

 

“One critical question that faculties will have to address is, do you want to have a synchronous classroom or an asynchronous classroom? You can have the tools available, but opinion is divided between which one will be the dominant communication strategy.  When we talk about online education, it's not partly in the classroom and partly online.  That is supplementing the traditional classroom. We are now at the other end of the spectrum - the asynchronous classroom and learning network, where primarily the communication is not in real time.

 

“Our company, Online Learning, was originally founded as the Home Education Network, where we acquired the rights to UCLA Extension courses as our primary course provider. The original concept in 1994 was to be a videotape-based system.  By 1996, it was clear the company had to shift to an internet-based delivery system.

 

“The research we have done suggests we pursue the continuing education market. These are people that have obtained their degree but are required to undertake continual education by their professions and associations.

 

“Course content is a primary concern of these students and they want ‘name brands’. They are worried about fraudulent universities that take photographs of other universities and faculty members, put them online and in brochures and sell tuition. Two universities like this have recently been closed in the USA.

 

“The research also suggests the majority wanted asynchronous courses and the flexibility to be able to attend a class that fits in with their schedule.  But they also wanted to “attend class’ with other students and they also wanted to have an expert leading that conversation. So how do you instruct a cohort of students, interacting between and amongst each other but not in real time? 

 

“Not forgetting it also has to be very user-friendly. Students want customer service and not just an 1800 number. They want somebody they know the name of in the classroom who they can ask questions of.

 

“So for those institutions considering on-line education, a critical element at stake is your reputation.  Unfortunately, the prevalent mentality with many is if they offer a course, students will enroll, have a wonderful experience, and this will advance their institution, giving them the cutting edge. 

“Institutions also have to fight the inclination to put their least popular courses on line first in the hope that it will salvage them somehow. 

 

“Another major issue is intellectual copyright.  Institutions have to ensure the people paying tuition fees that they have protection when they access a class. They don’t want to be saying things in a classroom where anybody can watch.  It sounds obvious, but it's not well thought through universally. 

 

“Marketing is critical yet educational institutions are not used to it. For example, the former UCLA, which has 35,000 fulltime students, allocated $1500 to admissions to get applicants for all of its 17 schools.  It generates about 70,000 applications every year so why would they spend more money?

 

“Are they getting the right students?  What are they doing in terms of profiling who they want to add to the student body - what is the cyber-demographic profile of these people, how do we identify them and so on.  Also, what is the strategy to reach those people? This is all basic marketing. 

 

“One of the issues is how much institutions are going to charge. Our UCLA Extensions courses are a minimum 30 per cent more than UCLA charge to take the course on campus.  Institutions will need to look at regional, national and international costs and how they are evaluating the total costs.

 

“When looking at an acceptable attrition rate, institutions need to take customer service into consideration. Customers of the online education expect there will be an adapting world to met their needs. There should be standards and response times and text support.

 

“A major university worked for four years in a national program, spending $5,500,000. It released a progress report saying that because 49 per cent of their students left within the first 30 days, they needed to shorten the courses. The courses must be too long.  Incredibly, there was no customer service analysis in that document!

 

“I was asked to take a look at the future, and I think by 2004 the main issue is that online education is going to be more common place. Tools and services will be commoditised and bandwidth will no longer be a major issue.  Right now there are differences.

 

“Authentication (of students) for degree programs will be a major issue and an important obstacle for many institutions. A report by the National Education Association questioned the running outcomes of online education because there is no solid research.  However, there is a tremendous desire world wide for lifelong learning, and that is why I believe it's going to be an important part of the online education industry and category.

 

“Institutions will have to be selective in the courses they offer.  In my UCLA experience, dentistry and medical education is incredibly profitable for the schools and there are a lot of opportunities in engineering in the future.

 

“Our most popular courses include teacher courses because we know that 45 per cent of our students are teachers.  Also everybody wants to do accounting, I don't know why. And, screenwriting is very popular. One of the remarkable, but not surprising, occurrences, is the number of people with disabilities who do our courses. People with physical and geographical issues are a population that has never really been reached by universities.

 

“We feel very strongly about issues of protection of the author, intellectual property, copyright. UCLA and the faculty own that copyright. In our company we don't want to own any copyright or intellectual property, we are only concerned with our exclusive rights to distribute and deliver their content.

 

(John Colette)            “When we look at what film schools do it's not just a pedagogical business, it's also a production business.  It's a hands-on business in many senses.  Film making is a collaborative production enterprise, and what we're looking at with our trials is not just how do we teach people online, but how do we get them to collaborate in the manufacturing process using these telecommunications tools. 

 

“First, I am going to look at the traditional view of distance education, and then I'm going to talk about distributed production and collaborative production. 

 

“From 1995 there has been an increase in the opportunity to use digital technology and sending material over the web.  These enabling production technologies have had a profound effect on how we handle media.

 

“Essentially we're looking at this idea of distance learning, which is viewing a school as a pedagogical organisation that gives something to students. The way this usually operates is that we receive scripts and essays from students, and it's hosted at the film school on a World Wide Web server.  We can have text lessons, provide a structure, and the teacher can give feedback. We've had initiatives like this in universities where, for example, certain high attendance courses have been video taped so if you can’t get to the lecture, you can borrow the tape.   

 

“From the film school point-of-view, we may leap frog this and think what is it that we actually do.  What is it that we are teaching people when they come into a production process and they have to work together as a group? This is where the first collaborative production model with the cyberport trials comes together. 

 

“What we've been looking at is establishing a common group of assets, which are rushes in terms of audio or video, and essentially enhancing the post production process so you can go through two remote sites.

 

“You could have two synchronised Media 100s, with the same body of rushes and can update their cut, come online and start to discuss what they're looking at. Essentially this doesn't preclude having a personal or physical relationship with the people you’re working with, but enhances your ability to be mobile in a contemporary industrial context.  You may need to manufacture films in the future with your creative base distributed.

 

“An example is the movie Mission Impossible II, which is in pre-production in Australia with the production designer team in Spain, Los Angeles and Australia.  This is a perfect example of how you could use online communication to share files, collaborative white boarding - a virtual meeting room to share ideas very quickly. 

 

“This first example is what we call a collaborative production and the second opportunity grows out of this.  This is a model of distributed production and it's a little different to the one that I showed previously where you're using the sort of pedagogical output of the film school.  It’s saying the film school exists beyond the walls of the school. 

 

“Our problem in North Ryde, Sydney, Australia, is that we’re a 40 minute drive from the central business district. However we notice ac