The online course uses a combination of HD streaming video to present our trademark CGI graphics and user-friendly analogies that give our course an unsurpassed conceptual clarity that our participants really love. There are a few reasons we decided to use this format rather than trying to present the materials live from Zoom or Teams platforms.
1. It provides better quality viewing experience.
As academics, we are very well-versed in distance learning. We delivered a Master of Science course in MRI for 15 years entirely on-line so we know what works well, and what doesn't work at all. Webinar software such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, BigBlueButton or Adobe connect, are capable of presenting very basic PowerPoint presentations, PDF files or live screen-sharing of other types of presentation, however, the screen refresh rate can be very poor. This is not an issue when a presentation just has bullet points and a few images, but is entirely unsuited to our dynamic content. Animations tend to jitter and lag. Our lectures contain hours of CGI animations running at 30fps and in high-definition. HD video is the only way we can guarantee a high quality experience that even exceeds live conference data projection.
2. It mitigates internet connection issues.
Since putting the course online in 2021, we have discovered that about 5% of our participants have local issues with connection. This is not a fault of the course, but the same issues that might occasionally cause you to lose broadband connection when browsing the web. In a business meeting you might miss a few minutes and it makes no difference, you don't even realise what you missed. With lectures, however, this could be a problem, you might miss something really crucial to your understanding of everything that follows - and you would not even be aware. Streaming video fixes this problem at a stroke. If you lose connection you can take over exactly where you left off and you don't miss a single thing.
Even worse, if the lecture presenter should lose connection the entire course would grind to a halt. Over the last four years, there have been at least two occasions when our local internet service has failed during a course. On one occasion there was a service outage for 30 minutes
To prevent this from affecting the course, we have enlisted a well-known streaming provider to host the content. By keeping everything on the cloud, it doesn't matter if our connection fails, the entire course will still be accessible to everyone. We use industry-standard technology from Amazon Web Servers - these are the servers that run Amazon Prime Video and our streaming format is the same as Netflix and most of the major Hollywood studios. We have to pay the hosting company for every second of video watched by every participant, but we thought that this was worth the cost. We needed something robust, secure and capable of high-quality streaming to a large number of people simultaneously and without eating too much of your bandwidth. We think we have succeeded in our goal and there is a sample video below that will allow you to test out your own setup.
3. It allows Rewinding and rewatching.
This is something that makes our online lectures better than live conference lectures. If you don't understand something when you hear it, you can rewind and watch it again. At the end of each presentation you can go back and review sections of the presentation that you would like to revisit. Our participant feedback tells us that they love this feature and it can only be achieved using streaming video.
