networked moving images for the life sciences >NEW LIFESIGN SITE!<

Materials Delivery Evaluation Report (Lifesign WP9:  Pedagogic Evaluation Milestone 1: Evaluate Materials Delivery) October 3rd 2002; Kerry Shephard and Gabriel Jezierski 1 Context Lifesign’s Deliverable D12 is the Pedagogic Evaluation Report. An indicated milestone is 06/02 ‘Evaluate Materials Delivery’ and this will be one component of the final Pedagogic Evaluation Report now due in March 2003. Pedagogic evaluation, the main focus of the final Pedagogic Evaluation Report, will focus on Objective 2 from WP9: to assess the impact of streamed video on current curriculum delivery within participating institutions in two MANS. The current success of the delivery of Lifesign’s learning materials is evaluated in this interim ‘Materials Delivery Evaluation Report’. It focuses on the "technical, institutional and legal frameworks that have had positive and negative impacts on how learners have accessed and interacted with the material". The report will not attempt to describe technical aspects of delivery in any depth but clearly successful learning and teaching using on-line resources depends fundamentally on successful on-line delivery of learning resources. For Lifesign’s evaluators, evaluation of ‘materials delivery’ is itself a component of formal pedagogic evaluation and not a separate activity. (Our evaluation methodology, including the evaluation of materials delivery, is described on the Lifesign website). Specific aspects of our evaluation processes that provide information about the delivery of materials are contained within this report. This report aims to distinguish between demonstrable ‘delivery of materials’ to learners (where learners and their learning needs have been identified) and another processes of ‘making materials available on a web-site’. The latter activity, while potentially beneficial, is less open to evaluation and so, arguably, less valuable to Lifesign and to the academic community. In a similar spirit, this report does address a range of issues that influence the ability of students to make use of Lifesign’s streamed video; streaming appropriate video to a computer in front of an identified student is not valuable to student learning if, for whatever reason, the student cannot view, or hear the video. Although the ‘Materials Delivery Evaluation Report’ is destined to be part of the final Pedagogic Evaluation Report it is also ‘formative’ in nature. Lifesign is not complete at this stage and it is hoped that current formal evaluation will inform the final stages of the ongoing development of Lifesign. 2 Generic aims of JISC 5/99. JISC Circular 5/99 described the development of the DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) for Learning and Teaching. The circular confirms (para. 4) that the main objective of the DNER is to stimulate the use of a collection of digital resources within all areas of the HE community. The circular established the context for funding within this area; in particular by specifying that the developments funded by this money must be clearly and specifically for learning and teaching, not generally for research (para.9). One area identified for funding related to the use of moving images and sound with a specific brief ‘to evaluate the use of networked moving image and sound material for learning and teaching’ (para. 63). JISC emphasise the importance of ‘evaluation’ throughout Circular 5/99. 3 Aims and objectives of Lifesign Lifesign’s aims and objectives are described in detail within our Project Plan, but essentially Lifesign aims to evaluate the use of networked moving picture and sound material for learning and teaching in the life sciences. Specific elements of Lifesign, categorised as ‘Work Packages’ include: content identification/ compilation; rights clearance; network/ equipment development; metadata development/ cataloguing/ research; content production; pedagogic evaluation; and dissemination. 4 Technical, evaluation and delivery milestones Establishment of Lifesign servers and the Lifesign website. The Lifesign website (www.Lifesign.ac.uk) was established at an early stage of the project and it now provides a ‘focus’ for the delivery of on-line materials. Lifesign’s servers are based in Portsmouth’s Media (now, Learning) Development Centre. The website rapidly developed as a ‘show piece’ for Lifesign’s collection of videos but also gives access to minutes of Lifesign meetings and to Evaluation and user–guide materials. The web site and much of the Lifesign collection were officially ‘launched’ at the Edinburgh ALT Conference in September 2001. Acquisition of video. Acquiring video footage, and the right to stream it, has been fundamentally a difficult task for colleagues at Portsmouth. Significant breakthrough occurred on July 27th 2001, nearly a year after the start of Lifesign, when agreement was reached between the EBS trust and Lifesign that enabled us to ‘stream’ the Shotlist biology collection to UK HE and FE. Other titles have subsequently been added to the Lifesign collection as a result of careful and painstaking negotiation between Lifesign partners and a range of owners of video-rights. Rights clearance. A significant difficulty for Lifesign has been the negotiation of rights to stream video. Although it was initially hoped that MAAS would undertake rights clearance on Lifesign’s behalf it became unlikely that MAAS would successfully license all the content required within the timeframe of the Lifesign Project.  Furthermore, the license requirements of MAAS were much more restrictive than those required by Lifesign; giving Lifesign greater manoeuvrability in negotiations than available to MAAS. It is significant that negotiations were hampered by uncertainty about the legal position of licences and permissions distributed by copyright holders before the advent of streaming technology. Colleagues at Portsmouth were clearly breaking new ground. Authorisation and authentication. Agreements between Lifesign and copyright holders generally required Lifesign to stream video only to authorised users. Lifesign developed its own authorisation and authentication processes based primarily on the IP addresses of authorised Institutions’ computers. As described below this had serious consequences for the Lifesign project and potential learners. Choosing suitable content. Lifesign set out to establish a ‘critical mass’ of content in the area of ‘practical procedures in first-year biological sciences’. Early discussions in Lifesign identified the need for a balance to be established; too narrow a range of subject material would limit the use of the collection to too few individuals while too great a range and the proposed benefits of critical mass would not be realised. Lifesign initially agreed to restrict the range of subject material to ‘practical procedures in first-year biological sciences’ but subsequently (October 2001) opened the field to ‘the (broadly defined) life sciences’ when it became clear that too few academics were using Lifesign resources. This process paralleled an extensive debate within Lifesign about the process of building the Lifesign collection. The Needs Analysis Approach (http://www.clt.soton.ac.uk/kerry/lifesignevaluationJune8.htm) focused on input by academic staff who expressed an interest in particular themes. The rationale for this was to ensure that Lifesign used its resources (including staff time) to develop applications that could potentially lead to the use of video by identified staff and their students; and hence to evaluated use. To support this approach a ‘prioritisation process’ based on ‘Expressions of Interest’ and ‘Evaluation Proposals’ was agreed by Lifesign in July 2001. Also a wide range of promotional and marketing activities (reported elsewhere) were undertaken to elicit ‘expressions of interest’. Lifesign also adopted the pragmatic Content Delivery Approach (http://www.lifesign.ac.uk/documents/process.gif) where the collection was supplemented by ‘life sciences video’ on the basis that it could be licensed for use, irrespective of whether or not identified staff or student users were known. A significant proportion of Lifesign’s collection was established on this basis. Identified staff and students subsequently used some of this footage and this certainly validates this approach to some extent. As described above, video that is ‘available to learners’ but not ‘delivered to identified learners’ is not strictly within the remit of this report as it its use is not open to any formal evaluation. 5 Examples of the delivery and use of Lifesign resources to support learning and teaching. Examples of the use of Lifesign materials, on which this evaluation report is based, are included here. Where available the ‘published’ case study, giving more information about the evaluation process and results, is referenced. This report only describes aspects of the ‘delivery of materials’ to students. The extent to which the materials supported learning is considered more fully in the published case studies and is the primary topic for the Pedagogic Evaluation Report. UofP Streamed video to support Pharmacy students. A lecturer in Pharmacy developed a WebCT course (including a URL link to the Lifesign streamed video ‘Manipulating DNA’) to accompany a series of lectures on Cellular Biochemistry and Genetics. The lecturer evaluated student-use of these resources, using a paper questionnaire given to students during the last lecture. Of 163 students, 75 attended the lecture and 25 submitted the questionnaire. None of the respondents had used the on-line resources and student tracking indicated that only seven students in total had visited the site. Most respondents indicated that a lack of time was the major problem. The lecturer also felt that students needed more training on how to access online resources. The lecturer was unable to demonstrate the videos during the lectures, as the computers in the lecture room did not have Windows Media Player installed. He felt that this was a major problem. (More recently the lecturer has worked with Portsmouth’s Media Development Centre to produce a Safety Video and an accompanying web page with multiple choice questions and links to segments of the video). UofS Application 1. Learning to Measure Blood Pressure. A lecturer in Social, Health & Behavioural Studies at the University of Southampton’s New College worked with the Lifesign team to produce a video stream about how to measure blood pressure and used this, as one of three learning resources, with second year students. The case study includes a summary of feedback data from the students. A total of forty-two students used the resources during two practical sessions, each on a different day. The streamed video was successfully delivered to all students. (http://www.clt.soton.ac.uk/kerry/LarkinCaseStudy.htm) Application 2 . Embedded video stream in a VLE for Nursing and Midwifery students. The educational activity involved here is a first-year module on Life Sciences taught to student nurses. The module ran over two semesters in the academic year 2001/2002 and involved over 700 students along with a large group of academic and support staff. Three videos were ‘embedded’ within the module’s Directed Learning Sessions by establishing hyperlinks, in Word documents, either to complete video streams; or to segments of video via ‘asx redirector files’. Extensive evaluation occurred.  From just over 750 students, approximately 350 made some use of video streams, outside of face-to-face sessions, and at least 265 confirmed that they enjoyed this learning resource. There were some problems. The need for students to acquire skills was a difficult issue. Streamed video was embedded within Directed Learning Sessions in a way that was thought not to require specific ‘video’ skills. Nevertheless receiving streamed video on a computer was a new experience for most students. Support staff observed that some students did not appreciate that there would be a time delay between clicking on a link and receiving the video; they assumed that access to the video was not possible. Anticipation of this delay was a ‘skill’ that needs to be taught. A similar problem arose where ‘buffering’ of incoming streaming video does not keep pace with playing; the video stops for a few seconds. Students occasionally assumed that the there was a fault and did not wait for the video to resume. The problem was compounded where videos were divided into short segments. Students watched each segment but occasionally thought that video segments had ‘crashed’, when in fact they had simply stopped where they should have. Written instructions were provided to clarify these problems but they do indicate the need for students to acquire a range of skills to view streaming video. Video was streamed by the LIFESIGN project with high levels of reliability. There were server crashes but these were rare. This, however, disguises an underlying problem. Student access to video streams was not via the LIFESIGN web-page but via hyperlinks embedded in Word documents supported in a Blackboard environment. As LIFESIGN implemented its ‘authorisation and authentication’ programme it changed the URL of videos used in the Nursing applications. As a result video, always available via the LIFESIGN web-site became temporarily unavailable via Blackboard. These errors were rectified rapidly but point to underlying problems in evaluating the use of resources supplied by projects, themselves undergoing development. This provides evidence for the need to have a ‘development server/platform’ and a ‘production/delivery server/platform’ to ensure that evaluated applications are not disrupted by project development. An additional problem related to the availability of video streams outside of University networks. In an attempt to conform to copyright licensing restrictions, LIFESIGN implemented IP-address-restriction, partway through the module, so that only users in UK Higher Education could access the video streams. Only students actually using computers with IP addresses registered to HE institutions were able to access ‘The Human Brain In Situ’ and ‘Endocrine System - The Human Body Series’. Students trying to access these videos ‘at home’ via a modem were refused access, unless linked to the internet via a remote ‘dial-up’ facility. The issues inherent within this restriction need to be reconsidered and will be considered in more depth in Lifesign’s Final Report. Throughout the module, Academic Staff kept the Evaluator informed about their concerns and reflections on their use of streaming video to support student learning. In general Academic Staff remained enthusiastic about both the potential for streaming video to support learning and its ongoing reality. Staff expressed enthusiasm for the quality of the videos identified and used. They were happy about the processes of embedding the video streams in Directed Learning Sessions and were happy to be researching into the use of streaming video to support student learning. They were also balanced in their feedback to the Evaluator and did say when the use of streaming video was not working. One quote from a ‘reflective email’ will illustrate the point and provides information that relates to the data on student access to, and use of, the resources. “I spoke to my class yesterday and asked specifically about the video. Those students who were able to access it thought it was very useful.... (but)…. It was commonly reported as fragmented, far too slow or it crashed. About 50% of my class said they tried to access it and gave up...that's not good.” The results do suggest that streamed video can contribute to useful resources to support learning by student nurses but, for a variety of reasons, it may not appeal or be adequately accessible to all students at present. (http://www.clt.soton.ac.uk/kerry/LS01CaseStudy.htm) Application 3. Video stream embedded in lecture presentation for student nurses. A streamed video on Cystic Fibrosis was shown within a lecture for student nurses. The video was used to reinforce the technical content of the lecture by providing a 'real patient' context to the genetic and biochemical theory. The value of the video as a learning resource was identified by the lecturer and, at first, it was described as ‘recommended viewing’ to the students. On this occasion there was no way to ensure that students did view the video (any more than to ensure that they read recommended texts). On the next occasion the URL for the video was embedded within a PowerPoint presentation, used within the lecture, and streamed via a video projector to the audience. The video takes 20 minutes and was used at the end of the 50-minute lecture. It was hoped that the video would allow students to re-examine the information provided in the earlier presentation in the context made possible by ‘video’. The video worked very well. In a subsequent lecture the activity was not so successful. The lecture started late (due to the previous occupants of the lecture room ‘running over’), the video projector developed a fault (that needed correction part way through the lecture) and the video stream ‘froze’ half-way through. By this time the lecture period was nearly over and there was insufficient time to restart the video. The lecturer considered that enough was shown to enthuse motivated students to access the video in their own time. (http://www.clt.soton.ac.uk/kerry/HarrisonCaseStudy.htm) Application 4.  Video resources to support Physiotherapy and Nursing students. A video on back-care, originally produced by the University of Southampton, was ‘reengineered’ for streaming via a Lifesign-funded project. It was provided via a purpose-built website to support the learning of  ‘students’ enrolled on a credited CPD/part-time Foundation Programme in Basic Moving and Handling. Students attend a week long session at Southampton and then continue their studies in their own homes/practices and in their local HE/FE institution. The project required Lifesign to restrict access to the streamed video to ‘students from those institutions that had purchased the Back-care Videocassette’. Lifesign’s IP address process was used for authentication and authorisation. Although this application is on-going it has so far raised a range of issues. As with the Nursing application above, access to Lifesign’s streams is not possible via student’s own computer at their home. Students, therefore, really did need to access the video at their local HE/FE institution. For most students this proved impossible. For some, the local HEI had not been included in Lifesign’s IP address inventory. Other students found that their local institution had not engaged in the ‘reciprocal agreement’ whereby students from another institution would be given (restricted) access to local resources. For some access was granted to library facilities but not to computer facilities. Moreover, even where access to computer facilities was granted following a request from the Evaluator, the equipment did not have sound cards and/or Windows Media Player. Even within Southampton, evaluators discovered that student ‘part-time’ registration gave automatic access to library resources but not to computer resources. Although much of this is beyond the remit of Lifesign, these factors severely limit the extent to which Lifesign actually ‘delivers materials’ to students. UofG  (Work in progress: Issues and Barriers) Application 1. Cardiac physiology Two senior lecturers in the School of Care Sciences at University of Glamorgan would like to incorporate the ECG and cardiac physiology video-material (or more especially 'segments of it' were it possible) into a multimedia distance-learning package for (pre and post registration) nursing. As part of developing workplace practice, the video streams would be "particularly useful and 'dovetail' with workbook content".  The purpose of using the materials would be to develop the student’s skills in the interpretation of electrocardiographs". To achieve this, the video would be embedded as part of a learning activity. This learning activity would link to clinical practice. However, the integration of the streaming video into the distance learning course has been problematic and raised a number of fundamentally important issues in regard to the integration of such material: Format limitations      The (streamed video) resource – has a number of limitations in its current format. “The peripatetic nature of our learners means that they will be unable to stream this material from home or in the clinical environment due to limited bandwidth” and “The streamed video is thirty minutes in length. This is a long time to take in a tremendous amount of clinical information” Curriculum design – “how can the video materials be integrated into learning and teaching?” Learning styles – “The use of streamed video in its current format is passive” and so needs to be incorporated into an active learning task”. Workplace (learning) resource access – the clinical setting i.e. hospital does not allow access to the NHS secure network, nor, if it did, does it have the bandwidth for high quality delivery”. Media – “would this available on CD ROM?” Lifesign partners are working with academics to overcome some of these problems, but others require Lifesign to reconsider its delivery and support processes. Application 2. Managing Pain A lecturer wishes to incorporate a number of Lifesign streams on Pain into his module Managing Pain which itself is delivered from the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Blackboard. This material will be for some 12 students doing a nursing course. The 12 students meet him on a regular basis and are likely to be accessing the material from home and so low band streams are being linked to. The method of evaluation will be for the Evaluation Officer to provide the member of staff with a url which can be embedded at the desired location in the learning materials and then the students will be asked to comment by clicking on the url which will take them to the evaluation form which they will complete and submit. This provides an ease of use approach for the lecturer whilst also providing a systematic approach to the evaluation-data collection. UWIC   (Work in progress) Application 1. Integration of Measurement of Blood Pressure streaming video into Year 1 Human Physiology The clip is going to be used as a backup resource during practical sessions concerned with Blood Pressure. Students in the two laboratory sessions (about 20 in each group) are going to be given verbal instruction  together with a handout. The video will be available from the Blackboard site on computers in the lab and students can refer to this at any time during the session. We will collect data from the students after these sessions for analysis of their impression. Other A number of academic staff have shown interest in the Lifesign materials but have as yet not made use of them. Beside the familiar issue of ‘lack of time’ to view and assess the materials there have been local issues in regard to access to the streams both in regard to the setup and configuration of the PCs and also the IP based restrictions. 6 Other evidence of use of resources Formally evaluated applications are not the only evidence of the use of Lifesign resources. Lifesign partners have received complimentary email from as far away as Fiji and we know (e.g. from Southampton academic staff) that the URL’s of Lifesign’s streams are given to students in lectures, on handouts and in reference lists. We have no way, however, to evaluate either the delivery of the streams to students or their use in supporting student learning, without the involvement and cooperation of academic staff. It is possible that analysis of server web-logs at Portsmouth will give some more information in the future. 7 Significant elements of successful use of resources for curriculum delivery Use of the Lifesign website. The examples described above suggest that the website itself is not extensively used to deliver materials to students. Evaluated access by students to Lifesign’s video streams is generally via other processes described below. Academic staff preparing to develop on-line resources in the University of Southampton’s Application 2 (see above) made it clear that they felt that students needed to do no more than ‘click on a link to see the video’. The considered it inappropriate to ask students to ‘manipulate’ elements of the web page, or to use menu choices in Windows Media Player, to view video streams. Yet the LifeSign website fulfils other purposes that are important to allow the materials to be used within an educational context. In effect, the site forms a tool for preview and selection of available material, and provides information to assist configuration and setup of streams for use with students (e.g. “Get URL”, Evaluation and Case Study material, Project contacts). However, limitations exist within the current design for both educational and promotional purposes, as Lifesign’s evaluators suggest that it is possibly, and currently, too complex for many academic staff to use. Academics have also indicated that an extended tools range is required for use of many of the streams to be practical. Use of URLs. URLs to individual video streams are widely used to deliver materials to students. URLs have been most commonly incorporated as hyperlinks in Word documents in VLE, or on a purpose built, web pages. VLEs. Many academic staff who are inclined or able to use streaming video to support student learning also teach extensively through ‘Virtual Learning Environments’. In this form it is vital that embedded hyperlinks remain stable. Lifesign did not manage to stabilise its URLs for key evaluated applications. ASXfiles. At least two applications gave access to students to segments of video streams, rather than to the start of the video; in particular so that learning activities could be closely and deliberately linked to specific video footage. Pedagogically, this seems to work well but it does require significant technical effort by lecturers or other learner supporters. Support elements; what made these applications work? Applications that successfully delivered streamed video to identified students worked, in general, as a result of successful interaction between many services, events and people. Pivotal was the role of the educational evaluators/developers who offered a ‘go-between’ service between technical elements of Lifesign and the ‘teaching and learning’ activities of academic staff. There is little doubt that the limiting factor that dictated the extent to which Lifesign’s materials were delivered to identified students, was the extent of involvement of academic staff. Without involved academic staff, applications of streaming video that could be evaluated would not exist. Such involvement universally depended on the reputation of the evaluator, his or her rapport with academic staff and the extent of confidence that the academic developed in Lifesign. Where Lifesign resources and services did not match the expectations of the academic, this confidence rapidly diminished. On several occasions Lifesign’s service did not support the endeavours of the evaluators and resulted in poor delivery of materials. In general, these instances can be directly related to the inherent tensions that exist in developing a pilot system which must be offered simultaneously as some level of user service to ensure later uptake. Yet for LifeSign, pilot and technical service issues have not been the limiting factor. Rather, the technical issues encountered needed to be better considered, aligned, and integrated specifically with evaluation and user needs in mind; and this needed to happen from the very start of the project, i.e. much earlier than it inevitably did. Part of the difficulty appears to have arisen from the way the project work packages were designed, which encouraged task isolation. Better integration across work packages was needed, to ensure relevant partners worked more closely across work packages. This would necessitate wider consultation in relation to each core task, to assess and allow action on projected impact across the project group. It is unfortunate that these natural tensions within development projects have manifested themselves to academic staff and evaluators as considered decisions where Lifesign’s obligations to academic staff and students were not prioritised; in particular above the ongoing development of ‘authorisation and authentication’ mechanisms to meet licensing obligations. It is necessary to also respond to the criticism that this ‘clash of priorities’ could have been simplified here by maintaining a ‘development server/platform’ separate from a ‘production or delivery server/platform’. In fact the project has worked consistently from the outset to achieve this scenario, but it is inevitable that until a pilot service system is sufficiently developed to be able to mirror a stable system, tandem building at this early stage will usually introduce unsustainable additional workload on development staff. This means that the first systems built to deliver material must always be developmental, and subject to change. Given the timescale of projects like LifeSign, it is also inevitable that recruitment of the first users must be to the initial pilot system. Consequently, users of the early development system will always be subject to fluctuations, and fluctuations are disruptive to academic environment, particularly when involving students within formal course scenarios as the nature of LifeSign evaluation demands. Formal handover and notification of changes, for example to stream URLs, becomes evaluation critical, but course lifetimes are typically on an annual cycle and development system schedules must be more frequent to meet project targets within the funding period. Developing mechanisms for handling these situations as a project function becomes paramount. In addition, combining the LifeSign evaluation requirement to examine content embedding within full educational scenarios, with the use of streaming media, means that any fluctuation within the delivery system design has a much higher disruption factor, than for example software implementations within learning environments. In the latter, version control and phased evaluations go some way to mediating these problems. However, the difficulties experienced by the LifeSign evaluation team extend beyond these areas, and relate to the “live” nature of the stream and web delivery handling, as opposed to “snapshot” control. 8 Problems encountered with materials delivery Some significant problems have been described above. These are; ·        Changes to URLs without advanced notification was damaging(damaging to student learning, to the evaluation process and to the reputation of Lifesign’s evaluators). ·        Lifesign’s inability to deliver video streams in evaluated applications to students via their personal computers and modems. In both cases the problems are not easy to solve and at least partly depend on factors outside of Lifesign’s control. This is even more so with respect to other problems; ·        The infrastructure to support staff and student use of video streams is only slowly developing within UK institutions and it is probably not keeping pace with technological advances. Until academics can reliably anticipate the presence of Internet links and video projectors in teaching rooms they are unlikely to work seriously with streamed videos as learning resources. ·        The technological possibilities are changing far more rapidly than staff awareness, willingness, and ability to use them. The use of streamed video to support student learning is new and relatively ‘untried’ and academics are naturally reluctant to rely too heavily on it. Lack of staff involvement is the single greatest impediment to successful delivery of streamed video. ·        The lack of anything equivalent to UK Libraries Plus for IT has been identified as one factor restricting the potential for what may be termed ‘dispersed delivery’ (i.e. enabling students to access a video stream at a variety of academic locations is severely restricted). ·        There is insufficient provision for educational scenarios using streaming media and understanding of the technical and organisational mechanisms available for access and control of streams, within the UK Copyright Act exemptions for education. ; This results in limitations surrounding licensing and delivery; and reluctance on behalf of copyright holders to grant licenses. These  all significantly hamper the ability to conduct pedagogic evaluation of the use of streaming video to support learning. Although much of this is out of the control of Lifesign, Lifesign must continue to address the problems. The final report will indicate precisely which findings need to be aimed primarily at external audiences and Lifesign will aim to ensure that these external audiences get the message. 9 Advice on future Materials Delivery based on Pedagogic Evaluation The final few months of Lifesign may well see the greatest use of our resources. In the short term materials delivery will be enhanced if Lifesign can stabilise its URLs so that academic users develop confidence in them (by for example, separating the  ‘development server/platform’ from a ‘production/delivery server/platform’). It is probably unlikely that other problems can be resolved in the short term; but they need to be addressed; and resolution in the longer term. ·        Lifesign’s present methods of authorisation and authentication (based on institutional IP address ranges) have been shown to be insufficient to meet the needs of the UK’s lifelong learning; work-based learning; and widening participation agendas. Conventional campus-based and placement students also need to access learning resources off-campus, without the constraint of university dialup provision. Mechanisms exist to handle this, but have not been explored due to technical resource constraints. This has significantly hampered evaluation and constrained evaluation opportunities. ·        Lifesign needs to produce more ‘user-friendly’ ways for academics, or learning technologists, to develop play-lists, and other devices, to link on-line learning activities to on-line segments of video. Few learners want to watch complete videos. LifeSign has so far explored and tested techniques to meet these needs, but this has been little documented or presented within the project. A plan for actual development and documentation of techniques and tools for users is needed so that uptake is not restricted unnecessarily. ·        Lifesign needs to work with others to promote ‘version compatibility’ in software. Considerable problems are caused to academics, students and learner supporters when computers do not have the right version of Windows Media or any other Player relied upon. Portsmouth’s media producers hope to develop a mechanism whereby the ‘receiver’s version of WMP’ is detected by the server that then sends a compatible stream. ·        Efforts must be made to enable academics to make better use of Lifesign’s resources. Although not a solution, the LieSignweb site certainly could be improved to become a better promotional resource. 10 Links to the wider Pedagogic Evaluation Report The Pedagogic Evaluation Report will build on this Materials Delivery Report but focus on evaluation of the impact of Lifesign’s video streams on student learning. 11 Summary Lifesign is undertaking ‘cutting edge’ research and development and it is producing some significant data on which further research and development can be built. It is, arguably, not yet managing to deliver its materials in a sufficiently broad range of evaluated applications to fully ‘evaluate the use of networked moving picture and sound material for learning and teaching in the life sciences’….but it has also had to cope with far more ‘rights clearance’ issues and problems than it had anticipated.