How to Build a Production Studio for Online Courses

Campus Technology: When the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign began running massive open online courses through Coursera, the institution quickly realized that the real power of those free courses was to introduce a world of prospective students to its campus programs — including the iMBA, its new online master's degree in business. The Digital Media team within the College of Business has played an important role in helping the college's production capabilities grow in quality and quantity. Now that team faces what may be its biggest challenge ever: accommodating up to 3,000 students in any particular online course.

Building up to that point has been an iterative process, said Digital Media Manager John Tubbs. The earliest video setup used for live sessions consisted of a webcam sitting on top of a 40-inch television monitor. "It was pretty crude," he recalled.

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