"The Opencast community is a collaboration of individuals, higher education institutions and organizations working together to explore, develop, define and document best practices and technologies for management of audiovisual content in academia. Through the mailing list, website and collaboration among its members, the community will strive to offer guidance and information to help others choose the best approach for the delivery and usage of rich media online.

The Opencast community also supports community-driven projects to solve common issues in management of academic audiovisual content. These projects will include open source software development, such as Matterhorn, and research focused projects. The Opencast Community will support these projects through feedback and participation in project-related activities"(http://www.opencastproject.org/mission_statement.

In Canada, the University of Toronto and the University of Saskatchewan are involved, and there are institutions around the world signed up for the project. It is definitely worth a look.

The Matterhorn project is an important part of the overall project and is described as:

"The software will support the scheduling, capture, encoding and delivery of educational content to video-and-audio sharing sites such as YouTube and iTunes, so that learners can access lectures when and where they need it"  (UCBerkeley News, http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/07/28_matterhorn.shtml.

One of the questions I have is about the focus on delivering lectures via this medium rather than looking at the overall educational value of this technology. Reproducing the classroom experience seems to be shortsighted. Is content that supports student learning assumed here?

Despite these concerns I think this is an exciting project and I would like to see how it can be used for distance learning.  Afterall, that is what our mcast project is all about.