Programme

Olaf A. Schulte, Opencast Board
Ypatios Grigoriadis

Opening remarks.

Ian Dolphin [Apereo Foundation]

The COVID-19 Pandemic has sharply challenged traditional higher education institutions to move their offerings wholly, or very significantly, online. In what is widely perceived as an existential crisis for higher education as a whole, uncertainty has become the new normal. For higher education information technology, that general uncertainty is compounded by widely-used commercial-proprietary software. Will the “sweetheart licensing deals” offered by proprietary vendors early in the pandemic be maintained? How long for? How will this impact cost and the capability to innovate to meet new challenges? With technology now central to the existence of higher education institutions, can we accept a future where innovation is constrained to proprietary software that is effectively invisible to us, and subject to vendor-provided modification only?

Name: Sandra Schön
Institution: TU Graz

Open educational resources are teaching and learning materials that have explicit open licensing (see UNESCO declaration, 2019). Among the best-known open licences are the three licensing options of Creative Commons CC BY, CC BY-SA and CC0. The keynote highlights and gives examples for OER videos and their multiple usages and adaptation and advice on how-tos for OER videos development.
Dr. Sandra Schön is Senior Researcher in the “Educational Technology” team at the Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), project manager at the “Forum New Media in Teaching Austria” (Graz) within the project “Open Education Austria Advanced” and Adjunct Professor of Innovations in Learning at the Universitas Negeri Malang (Malang State University, Indonesia). Working focus: digital innovations for learning and teaching, OER, MOOCs, Maker Education. Contact: sandra.schoen@tugraz.at, further information: https://sandra-schoen.de

Name: Olaf A. Schulte
Institution: ETH Zürich

We are going to present an update on the belated project of a video portal being developed to serve as a default distribution channel for Opencast.

Name: Katrin Ihler
Institution: ELAN e.V.

A rebuild of the Elasticsearch indices used for the Admin UI and the External API is both incredibly slow and prone to errors due to its asynchronicity. This talk delves into the reasons and introduces the work that has been done to improve the situation, as well as things that are still left to be done.

Name: Carlos Turro
Institution: Universitat Politecnica de Valencia

Paella Player is the default player for Opencast 9. In this talk we will outline the changes since the last release, as well as a roadmap of the next Paella 7 version. Paella 7 is planned as a major release with a lot of technical changes, and the migration from previous releases will not be straightforward if there are local integrations. So I’ll present the release calendar and how we plan to address this change.

Name: James Perrin
Institution: University of Manchester

Discussion of AWS S3 Storage Classes and how best to manage them; whether by Opencast or S3 Transition Policies. Part of the talk will focus on using the S3 Glacier Storage class and whole this differs from the separate AWS Glacier service.

Meet for coffee at the lobby.

Name: Herwig Rehatschek
Institution: Medical University of Graz

With the availability of affordable high-quality recording hardware and video management platforms lecture recording becomes a popular service for students at a steadily increasing number of universities. Since each university has its own infrastructure and general conditions, the introduction is still an individual process requiring a lot of technical know-how and a clear definition of the workflow process. At our university, we currently have about 1.180 recorded lectures, providing students access via our Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle and via our open source video portal. With a main focus on barrier-free access to learning material in general and hearing-impaired students in specific, we wanted to provide subtitles for all recordings. In addition, subtitles are also very helpful for students who do not have German (our main university language) as their mother tongue. Subtitles should be at least in German, preferably also in other languages in order to support foreign students (such as Erasmus) at our university as well. In this presentation we will share our experiences how to efficiently create subtitles in a semi-automatic way. Furthermore, we will share the lessons learned with the introduction of the Opencast platform and which technical workflow we particularly defined for our university. This workflow is optimized for a moderate growth of recorded lectures – hence feasible for small and medium sized universities – and ensures a maximum of quality. It can be easily adapted to other universities.

Name: Julian Kniephoff
Institution: ELAN e.V.

A few tools in and around Opencast use have started to experiment with implementing the frontend parts in TypeScript instead of pure JavaScript. This talk aims to give a brief introduction to the language and its philosophy, explore the advantages it might have, report on some early experiences with this approach, and thus hopefully convince any doubters that this might not be such a bad idea.

Name: Maximiliano Lira Del Canto
Institution: Universität zu Köln

The GPU encoding has made a lot of advances in the last years, and it is a great tool to deliver very encoded videos way faster than the traditional CPU. Until the beginning of the last year, it was not possible to make overlays or create side by side videos with only the GPU. This presentation shows how to make it using a Nvidia card, FFmpeg and implementing in the Opencast workflow.

Name: Karen Dolan
Institution: Harvard University

The DublinCore metadata standard for disparate systems is a small portion of the complex set of Opencast metadata fields. This lightening talk highlights several benefits of adding a simplified External API endpoint that uses the DublinCore catalog to schedule and update event metadata.

Name: Matthias Neugebauer
Institution: University of Münster

The Opencast Workflow Editor allows for creating and visualizing Opencast Workflows without typing XML. In this talk, we quickly show how it’s working and what still needs to be done, and we talk about our future plans with it.
https://github.com/opencast/workflow-editor

Name: Lars Kiesow
Institution: ELAN e.V.

This session shows how to spin up and use Opencast’s runtime dependencies for development using docker-compose or podman-compose in just a few seconds.

Name: Rute Santos
Institution: Harvard University – DCE

In this talk, I will present some Harvard DCE use cases and the workflows and custom workflow operation handlers that we developed to address them.

Name: Julian Kniephoff
Institution: ELAN e.V.

More and more tools in and around Opencast use React as their frontend framework of choice. This talk aims to give a brief introduction into the main ideas behind it, shows how it compares to technologies more familiar to the Opencast community, and thus hopefully convince any doubters that this is actually not a bad idea.

Play in teams and challenge other conference participants in three rounds. Who is the best at solving anagrams, recognizing sounds and finding the connection?

Name: Sonia Tavani
Institution: ELAN e.V.

What was done to bring the Adopter’s Guide more up-to-date and how we can write documentation in such a way as to avoid (someone) having to do this in the future.

Name: Isabella Kutger
Institution: University of Stuttgart

In this presentation, I would like to outline my work and progress on the redevelopment of the Opencast UI with ReactJS. I will talk about the current state of the project and answer related questions.

Name: Felix Pahlow
Institution: ITZ MLU

Documenting Opencast’s admin features is really easy. The only 4 things you need are: 1. A GitHub account. 2. Understanding of Markdown 3. Knowledge of the topic and 4. The will to document.

Name: Lars Kiesow
Institution: ELAN e.V.

In this hands on session we will take a look at using Prometheus to extract metrics about Opencast and Opencast nodes and how to use these for monitoring and alerting.

Name: Jonathan Neugebauer
Institution: University of Münster

This presentation gives an introduction to Authentication using OpenID Connect. The concepts are applied on Opencast by demonstrating a prototype deployment. Advantages of employing OpenID Connect are discussed.

Name: Julian Kniephoff
Institution: ELAN e.V.

The Opencast Annotation Tool is not the most visible part of the Opencast community/ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean its development is standing still. This presentation will shortly present two big extensions that we developed at ELAN over the course of the last couple of months, and also give a quick overview over the project as a whole, and its potential future.

Name: Lukas Kalbertodt
Institution: ELAN e.V.

The backend of the new video portal (Tobira) is being written in the programming language Rust. As Rust has not been used in the Opencast community before, naturally one question comes up: why choose something new over something well-established? In this presentation, I will explain the reasoning behind our choice and talk about our experiences with Rust so far. There will also be a brief crash course to explain the basics of the language.

Name: Lars Kiesow
Institution: ELAN e.V.

PyCA is a fully functional Opencast capture agent written in Python. It is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Name: Lukas Kalbertodt
Institution: ELAN e.V.

I recently added a few new rules to the code style checker in the Opencast repository: Checkstyle. A few other developers already ran into this and were, I’m sure, delighted. In this talk, I will quickly explain what rules were added, why they were added and how I plan on fixing all remaining style violations across the code base.

Name: Arne Wilken
Institution: ELAN

A quick live demo of the new video editor for Opencast, showing off the current features and talking about future plans.

Name: Carlos Turro
Institution: Universitat Politecnica de Valencia

In the last 10 years, Paella has accumulated some technical debt that have to be addressed. More in detail we have to get rid of the singleton design pattern, which prevents easier integration in other platforms, plugin lifecycle, arrangement of video elements, which affects accessibility, and some others. The paella player 7 will address that, but will carry on some breaking changes. So in this technical talk I will talk from a technical point of view about the new structure of the player, how you should be prepared to integrate your own plugins, how to test the pre-release version and the long term design decisions in paella.

Meet for coffee at the lobby.

Name: Lars Kiesow
Institution: Elan e.V.

Since the beginning of this year, Opencast has a new release and development process allowing for more agile development and faster delivery of new features. In this talk you can learn how this will impact you and what you can expect from new minor and major releases.

Name: Matthew Coupe
Institution: University of Manchester

During the Covid-19 pandemic, our development team were tasked with flipping our Opencast-backed Lecture Capture service to help the University to rapidly move teaching online. This presentation covers our journey through the operational side of how we deployed Opencast Studio, performance tested our capacity and capability, re-purposed our VM infrastructure to meet projected needs, enhanced our transcription and video playback systems to comply with accessibility requirements, and dealt with some curveballs along the way.

Name: Lars Kiesow
Institution: ELAN e.V.

This session is showing off a production-ready install of Opencast. It will be a live install, explaining all necessary steps along the way.

Name: Pascal Seeland
Institution: Universtity of Stuttgart

In this talk, I will present how the number of recordings and the total hours of recordings have evolved in Stuttgart from the beginning of our Opencast journey in summer 2015 to now.

Name: Nina Herrmann
Institution: WWU – Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

The Lightning Talk shortly demonstrates the current possibilities to integrate Opencast Videos into the LMS Moodle. All Plugins developed in Moodle can be found at Github (https://github.com/Opencast-Moodle).

Name: Christian Greweling
Institution: Universität Osnabrück / ELAN e.V.

Opencast scales! During the corona crisis we were faced with a tremendous increasing demand on videos. We had to scale up the system, we will show how and present some usage numbers. The whole thing was also a gamechanger of how opencast is used. We had to move from a hosted full video service to self service video management tool for lecturers. We will give a short overview of the features we integrated into our LMS and how they are used.

Name: Farbod Zamani
Institution: ELAN e.V.

This integration now helps Moodle users to choose video from Opencast into their H5P interactive videos. In Moodle 3.10 version the feature is accessible as a core functionality.

On 28th January 2021, a world was performed to life. It emerged in the morning from one single block hovering within the immensity of the digital void and from that incipient point, it expanded branching out in every direction. It multiplied in stacks of blocks and interconnect ed structures, but most importantly, in stories and experiences lived, told and woven together by the actions and interactions of a community of avatars. There were ceremonies, games and assemblies, each building upon the previous and incrementally unfolding a history-in-the-making until, at the end of that day, the whole thing came to an end. The players logged off, the server unplugged and the world was shut forever, complete in its full circle of birth, growth and death. Or so we thought.
You are called on an expedition into the ruins of that very same world to discover what follows the end of its time, what memories remain buzzing in its spaces and what meanings carry on beyond its future.

Budour, Francesco and Sebastian study architecture at TU Graz. During a Master Studio, they involved themselves in exploring further possibilities of world-building in digital spaces. Through a community-making process, the game becomes a medium of performative narration, fostering the imaginative potential of architecture.

Olaf A. Schulte, Opencast Board

The Opencast Board will review 2020 and discuss strategies for 2021 and beyond with the community.

Name: Lukas Kalbertodt
Institution: ELAN e.V.

Thanks to new and modern Javascript APIs like `MediaRecorder` and `getDisplayMedia`, we can write applications like Opencast Studio to let users record their webcam and screen without installing any software, which is great! However, browser support for these features is not always optimal… and sometimes just weird. This talk is a report of all the strange behavior, weird video files and browser bugs I encountered when working on Opencast Studio.

Name: Greg Logan
Institution: Opencast/Loganite

Opencast has a number of outstanding low hanging fruit. Come hear from the community coordinator about them, and which ones we should tackle first!

Name: paul pettit
Institution: manchester university

Getting Opencast studio to talk to Manchester’s Opencast implementation was my first task on joining the team at the start of the pandemic. I’ll talk about how we integrated studio into our system through our video portal, where users have no direct access to Opencast and provide some statistics on usage.

Name: Christoph Götzl
Institution: VST GmbH with Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Collaboration)

Lecturers often exceed the scheduled end of the recording because they had no way of saying, other than the current time, how long the currently active recording will run. Especially in times of distance learning and the need for recorded lectures, this issue increased due to the lack of students in the lecture hall.

To solve this problem, the Friedrich Schiller University Jena has integrated Opencast into their AV-control systems to warn the lecturer before an event is about to end. The AV-control systems (Crestron and AMX) of all major lecture halls are now able to display a variety of information about the currently running recording event and the upcoming events, provided via the Opencast external API.

The presentation will outline how the modules can be integrated into a control system and discuss how they can improve the recording experience for the lecturer.

The code of the modules (Crestron Simpl# and AMX Netlinx) will be open source and available for free.

Name: Greg Logan
Institution: Opencast/Loganite

This talk will go over how any can review pull requests. We will cover topics in relation to both a technical reviewer, and a non-technical reviewer. Expect to come away with an understanding of what you can help with, and why it’s so important.

Name: Natalie Mona Matthews
Institution: Harvard University

With classes operating remotely, more instructors are using Zoom cloud recordings than ever before, but how best to include those recorded lectures in our existing Opencast systems? The Zoom Ingester Pipeline (ZIP) is a tool developed by DCE for ingesting Zoom cloud recordings either automatically or on-demand. It allows our production staff to use Opencast’s video editing capabilities, and our students to view all classroom and Zoom recordings in one place. We’ll share what we’ve learned from designing ZIP and integrating with Zoom. ZIP runs on AWS, but we’ll walk through the key components that could be implemented using any serverless architecture provider.

Name: Lars Kiesow
Institution: ELAN e.V.

The Opencast development process and its roles were originally defined over 10 years ago, assuming that people involved in this process are mostly software engineers and that Opencast was an externally funded project with several universities included in the funding. Many things have changed since then. Opencast has matured. You don’t need a developer any longer to run Opencast. Many contributors are (Dev)Ops, … but the fundamental assumptions about rules and roles stayed the same. This regularly causes problems in development and hinders innovation.

In this session we want to take a short look at some fundamental problems we have seen and sometimes already talked about over the last few years. The session will start with a brief presentation to shine light on the issues we face and will then become an open discussion, as we have to solve these as a community.

Meet for coffee at the lobby.

Name: Greg Logan
Institution: Opencast/Loganite

With the ongoing COVID crisis, most institutions have switched to online learning. ETH Zurich is one such institution, and is using Zoom to facilitate live lectures. ETH needed a way to ingest their cloud recordings from Zoom’s cloud to their own, so we have developed an integration which moves the data into Opencast. This session will cover the good, and the bad sides of this development, as well as opportunities for the future.

Name: Lars Kiesow
Institution: ELAN e.V.

The Opencast development process and its roles were originally defined over 10 years ago, assuming that people involved in this process are mostly software engineers and that Opencast was an externally funded project with several universities included in the funding. Many things have changed since then. Opencast has matured. You don’t need a developer any longer to run Opencast. Many contributors are (Dev)Ops, … but the fundamental assumptions about rules and roles stayed the same. This regularly causes problems in development and hinders innovation.

In this session we want to take a short look at some fundamental problems we have seen and sometimes already talked about over the last few years. The session will start with a brief presentation to shine light on the issues we face and will then become an open discussion, as we have to solve these as a community.

Name: Matthias Neugebauer
Institution: University of Münster

educast.nrw is a new video platform offering for the Universities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). It focuses on education and research purposes and supports video uploads, lecture recordings as well as livestreaming. We use Opencast as the central component for the service. This talk will present our approach of deploying the educast.nrw service.

Name: Stephen Marquard
Institution: University of Cape Town

In March 2020, UCT pivoted to fully online learning for all teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To provide the maximum possible support to students, we scaled up a small captioning pilot to provide transcripts and captions for most video material re-used or created for teaching in 2020. In the latter half of 2020, we also introduced Google Speech transcription to provide an option for fast captions with lower accuracy, paired with self-service caption editing.

Name: Matthias Neugebauer
Institution: University of Münster

Container virtualization takes over the data center by storm – why not also edge devices like capture agents? This talk will present how we at the University of Münster run pyCA in Kubernetes on our capture agents.

Name: Julian Kniephoff
Institution: ELAN e.V.

The new Opencast video portal is currently experimenting with implementing its backend services as a GraphQL API, instead of using the classical REST approach that is prevalent within the Opencast ecosystem. After giving a brief overview of the topic this talk will explain why we think this is a good choice, and report on our initial experiences with it.

Based in Graz, Austria, HaydeTanz is a musical bridge between western music, the musical idiom of the Balkan Peninsula and the East Mediterranean area. A unique sound, combining modern harmonies, compositional techniques and sound production with the soul of south-east European and Mediterranean music…defined by the philosophical duality of joy and sadness that is always part of the human experience…sometimes emotional, sometimes mathematical but never forgetting to laugh and have fun! A musical cocktail that speaks directly to the ear, goes under the skin and moves the legs…

Name: Arne Wilken
Institution: ELAN

In 2020, BigBlueButton has become a video conferencing tool used at many universities worldwide to help with online education. While recordings are natively possible within BigBlueButton, managing those recordings becomes a hard task and video processing on the conferencing infrastructure may have a negative impact on performance. This session shows an integration between BigBlueButton and Opencast to offload the processing and to use Opencast’s features and integrations to get the recordings to students.

Name: Rute Santos
Institution: Harvard University – DCE

We will show Harvard DCE’s process to index all transcripts (automated and human-generated), making it possible for students/instructors to search for specific content across lectures.

Name: Farbod Zamani
Institution: ELAN e.V.

The Plugin integrates Opencast features into WordPress in a secure and reliable way. Provided features such as Video Upload, Opencast Studio, List and Single View of the videos as well as Video management are now available to the WordPress users based on user roles defined by administrators.

Name: Anna Saxer
Institution: Universität Innsbruck

Mainly within the last year, lecture capture and video management with Opencast has become a major service at the University of Innsbruck. There are several different video sources being processed in Opencast in order to meet the high requirements of digital teaching. For instance, as one of the first universities in Europe, we implemented the handling of BigBlueButton-recordings in our productive environment. This article will give you an overview about the Opencast-Implementation at the University of Innsbruck and will present the integration in other systems, like in our learning management system OpenOlat. We will also give a short overview about the Opencast-Integration for the webconferencing system BigBlueButton.

Name: Matthias Neugebauer
Institution: University of Münster

Opencast’s external API for some time now has been criticized both from a developer as well as from a user standpoint. Recently, Opencast developers started a discussion for ideas for a version 2.0. This birds of a feather will report on our findings and bring the discussion to a wider audience.

Name: Rüdiger Rolf
Institution: Universität Osnabrück

Opencast was successful as an automated recording service provider, and in the future there will still be a demand for such a service. But users produce now (2020 and 2021) many more videos from home and as they are used to it several lecturers will also keep doing this. We noticed that the users want to have more control over their content (changing visibility, reviewing, editing, deleting, re-using, sorting, grouping). The users want improved possibilities to produce videos from their (home) office (i.e. content for flipped classroom scenarios). And even students provide more content now (i.e. presentations as exam).

Do we want to give users more control? How does Opencast have to chance to support lecturers better that want to have control over their content? Which restrictions would still be useful? We would like to talk with the community about their experience and their demands.

Meet for coffee at the lobby.

Name: Tobias Schiebeck
Institution: University of Manchester

This presentation will explain how we transferred our database and archive into AWS and the issues this can cause. The one of the problems is the “unlimited” storage available on AWS and the way archive data is transferred into Opencast. It is very easy to move Data into AWS but as it has to be processed by Opencast you need to make sure not to push too much too fast otherwise your budget might go faster than you would like.

Name: Georg Holzmann
Institution: Auphonic

Auphonic is an automatic audio post production web service, built for podcasts and lecture recordings.

We develop AI-based audio algorithms for volume leveling (detects and balances levels between speakers, music and speech; does not amplify background or whiteboard noises; automatic compression), audio restoration (automatic noise and hum reduction; filtering of unwanted low frequencies), loudness normalization (LUFS targets; EBU R128), and much more.

Furthermore, our system can be used for audio/video format encoding, distribution to platforms, for speech recognition, and can be integrated into third-party systems and workflows like Opencast.

In this lightning talk, we will give a short Auphonic overview, speak about what’s going on behind the scenes and how universities can use Auphonic to created automated post production and publishing workflows with Opencast.

You can listen to some audio examples at auphonic.com/audio_examples to get an overview of our system.

Name: Daniel Ebbert
Institution: Universität Köln

The Opencast website opencast.org has been recreated and update. During this lightning talk the new website will be presented. Feedback is of course welcome.

Name: Katrin Ihler
Institution: ELAN e.V.

In this lightning talk we would like to present some numbers showing the effect the Corona Crisis had on SWITCHcast in 2020, and introduce the script we used to generate them.

Name Ypatios Grigoriadis
Institution: TU Graz

TU Graz TUbe, the video portal of TU Graz, has gone through radical changes during the last year. Highlights and the new and admittedly exciting status quo will be presented.

Olaf A. Schulte, Opencast Board

Open discussion regarding the first entirely virtual Opencast summit and plans for next year.

Meet-up of the German-speaking Opencast community.