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The Future of CCCSAT
Technology should be like electricity, you turn it on, and it’s there," says Sherilyn Hargraves, Project Director for the California Community College Satellite Network (CCCSAT). And that is exactly what she expects to happen when Californians receive educational content via CCCSAT. To ensure the transparency of the technology, CCCSAT uses satellite and broadband technologies to transmit content. Chris Brawner, CCCSAT’s chief consulting engineer, explained, "Broadband application from a CCCSAT perspective means delivering high quality multimedia to the community colleges throughout California." The project will begin with the transmission of video content via satellite to receiving sites located at California Community College campuses. The members of the California Community College system, guided by the members of the Faculty Senate, will select courses from the California Community College curriculum to offer. Content will be utilized at the discretion of each district. Once those decisions are made, CCCSAT will deliver the courses. The heart of the delivery system is the Network Operations Center (NOC) at Palomar College. Here, in a room much like the master control room of any television station, CCCSAT staff assemble, digitalize, store, and broadcast content. The difference is that a television station broadcasts one channel, while the NOC will start broadcasting on two channels and will expand to eight channels. All content, whether live or taped, is digitalized, compressed, and beamed to the satellite which sends it on to the receive sites. The CCC system content first arrives at the NOC as a videotape. The videotapes are converted to MPEG-2 formats, compressed, and stored on computers. In a fully automated process, the broadcast schedule is sent to this video archive, which then supplies content to the video servers, computers that each store many days of broadcasting. Video digitalization, compression, and transmission are only the beginning. Hargraves said, "We’re looking at the broadband full-media opportunities for learning." Those opportunities will include use of the Internet within the near future. Hargraves noted that this stage of technological development is analogous to the early days of television, when people tuned in to watch what were essentially radio shows. As people learned the new technology, television expanded. As CCCSAT begins to deliver broadband content on the Internet, the technology--satellite transmission, digitalization, and error reduction algorithms--will deliver broadcast quality multimedia experiences to Californians. The shape of those experiences will be determined by the imagination of instructors as they explore the possibilities of broadband applications. Part Three: Parsing the video data with meta data tagging. |
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