Webstreaming – The Classroom in your Living Room!

Dr. Anthony Vipin

(Note of the editor: In this post Dr. Vipin explains how L V Prasad Eye Institute shares its morning lectures with the world. There are many tools to share live lectures over the Internet. We have covered some of them in the past. If you would like to try a free streaming tool, go to http://www.ustream.tv/)

Access to media both video and audio in today’s world is scaling new heights. The ability of current technology to deliver information to the end user in various forms is getting better by the day. In the education front, the impact of Video is much greater as they say – A picture is worth a thousand words!

Web streaming is the process of delivering multimedia — usually audio or video — over the World Wide Web. Web streaming requires three things: a media source in a format that can be streamed; server software that can stream it; and a client, or player that can play it on a user's computer or other device such as a smart phone.

It can be either streamed in real time or can be made available as video-on-demand for the participants.

A novel concept that we have embarked on is to make our Morning Classes LIVE for the entire world. L V Prasad Eye Institute is a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre in Hyderabad, India in the fight against blindness. Training and Education are recognized as key factors that influence the reach, range and quality of eye health service delivery.

We have begun transmission of our classes held at 7 AM (Indian Standard Time) on the Internet. The registration is FREE for users around the world.

You can click on the following link or can visit www.lvpei.org to register for the Online Webcast for Free.

http://174.122.81.186/patodia/

Confirmation of registration is both by SMS (available only in India) and Email.

We also add in a small document titled “Webcast requirements” in the email to help the users have a better experience. We list all the necessary hardware and software required to view the stream. The most common problem that we encounter is Low bandwidth speed at the user end that causes the stream to buffer and load. A minimum of 512 kbps is recommended.

Access to high quality education and content forms an integral part in improving the standards of training among the residents and fellows alike. Bringing the classroom to the living room truly gives the student the freedom to attend lectures and access world class content at the click of a button.

We believe that this initiative will open up many collaborations between academic institutes for the benefit of Ophthalmic Education in India and also the world.