OSHEAN boosts options for video storage

COLLABORATIVE EFFORT: David Marble is president and CEO of OSHEAN Inc., a nonprofit coalition of universities, K-12 schools, libraries, hospitals and government agencies throughout the region that provides Internet-based technology services for member institutions. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
COLLABORATIVE EFFORT: David Marble is president and CEO of OSHEAN Inc., a nonprofit coalition of universities, K-12 schools, libraries, hospitals and government agencies throughout the region that provides Internet-based technology services for member institutions. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

Many of the state’s nonprofits and educational hubs are getting a boost to their video services, as the consortium in charge of an exclusive online network is launching a new platform.

OSHEAN Inc., once known as the Ocean State Higher Education Economic Development and Administrative Network, is a nonprofit coalition of universities, K-12 schools, libraries, hospitals and government agencies throughout the region that provides Internet-based technology services for member institutions.

The fiber-optic network stretches nearly 600 miles. OSHEAN is launching a new video platform, dubbed “Video Commons 2.0 Platform,” on April 29. It’s calling the platform the next generation of video that’s come at the request of its members.

“Our members have been saying that they keep doing more and more video,” said David Marble, president and CEO of OSHEAN. “And you can’t just use video as a generic term, because it means something different to everybody.”

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Indeed, OSHEAN serves some of the state’s largest nonprofits, including the hospitals at Lifespan and Care New England, along with the state’s colleges and universities. The specialized industries require video for various purposes, explains Marble, such as classroom recordings for the schools and libraries and professional development and patient services for health care professionals.

“If a teacher is presenting in class and some students – or a guest lecturer – is coming in on video, all of that could be combined, webcast and stored for later retrieval in our system,” Marble said.

The video platform was developed through numerous discussions with member stakeholders, who expressed to OSHEAN the need for video to address their different industries.

“The technology is geared to their needs,” said Allan Ramella, senior project manager at OSHEAN, who took the lead on the software-development effort.

“It had to be very specific,” he added.

On the health care side, Marble says, the platform – equipped for storing through its cloud services – would allow doctors to provide real-time remote consultation to his or her patients and then that video could be stored as an electronic medical record. Professional-development courses could be stored and viewed later to better integrate with busy work schedules.

“This system is built into those workflows,” Marble said.

David Porter, director of media and technology services at the University of Rhode Island, says he’s worked with different carriers for about 30 years and that OSHEAN isn’t even in the same category. The new technology will be integrated into the school’s interface, which he says will make it easier on less-tech-savvy professors.

Porter says the university is investing in an experimental program called the flipped classroom, designed to alter the learning experience. Instead of sitting through a lecture and receiving homework to do between classes, students are expected to watch a lecture at home and participate in workshops during class.

“OSHEAN is the heartbeat of the higher-ed community,” he said.

The strategy has garnered some success, including at the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology in Tulsa, Okla., where in 2014 the use of flipped instruction increased first-time pass rates more than 12 percentage points to 96 percent, compared with the traditional learning style, according to TulsaWorld.com. The new video services should allow URI to build on best practices, according to Porter.

“Without OSHEAN we would be a few years behind,” Porter said. “We wouldn’t be able to afford it and it would take money out of our budget.”

The new video platform is one of several improvements OSHEAN has made to its system in the last decade. After receiving a $32 million federal grant, the consortium finished a fiber-optic broadband network called Beacon 2.0 in 2013, which increased Internet speeds at the connected institutions between 50 and 500 times a conventional high-speed connection. OSHEAN absorbed the R.I. Network for Education Technology in 2011, effectively expanding its network to include K-12 school and library-based technology services.

OSHEAN recently added the Rhode Island Foundation and Rhode Island Public Radio. It is also reaching out to some of the smaller nonprofits throughout the state to see if there’s any appetite to join the network, which is currently about 155 members. The video platform could help the network continue its growth, as it continues its innovation efforts to keep up with the fast-evolving world of fiber-optic and cloud technologies.

Looking forward, as video continues its evolution, OSHEAN and other telecommunication carriers will have to figure out a long-term solution to storage, according to Marble.

“IT is wrestling even today with storage and what’s the smart way to store things,” he said. •

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