Why doesn every UMass Boston OCW course offer video lectures?
Although video lectures are useful for students, there are many reasons that UMass Boston OCW does not include video lectures in every course. First is the issue of bandwidth. We are very much focused on making UMass Boston’s courses materials as accessible as possible to users all over the world, including the developing world. If we were to start depending on the video component as THE key element of every UMass Boston OCW course, we would be excluding a large portion of the UMass Boston OCW audience who are not using high-speed Internet connections. They would never be able to download the videos and we are very sensitive to that fact. Another key concern about video is cost. The technology for compressing and storing video becomes more and more affordable by the day, but it is still not affordable, or feasible from a production standpoint, for us to be compressing 20 video lectures for all of our courses. UMass Boston OCW does not have that kind of storage capacity, at this time. A
