Group Design Project – B202

Product design video presentation

VIDEO

Video is avalable at:
http://www.mr-lecture.co.uk/B202video.wmv

Introduction Script

Mr Lecture is an inovative new learning aid designed by students, for students. It is designed for anyone who has ever 'missed a lecture'. We have all done it for whatever reason and Mr Lecture has been built by people who know what students want from a learning aid. Mr Lecture is deferent to other learning aids, it builds upon their strengths such as collaboration with peers and adds another layer of interactivity and multimedia. We at Mr Lecture know that lecture slides and notes do not give you the same quality of education as being face to face with an experience lecturer describing the topic to you. We also know missing lectures can sometimes be unavoidable, so we provide a video libary of all the lectures for your course and have plans to roal the system out nationaly so you never have to miss a lecture again.

Design Requirements

1. Employed Student
-Special login area that facilitates:
-Uploading footage
-Uploading notes
-Show payment history to employee

2. Recording of Lecture
-Record lecture
-Good Position of camera for recording lecturer + lecture
-Good Quality Recording
-Picture Quality
-Sound Quality
-Fully majority of lecture

3.System Interface
-Website to deliver content
-Ability to select departments units by clicking the department on a map of the campus
-Allow students with disabilities to access site
-Low and high bandwidth version of site

4. Hosting
-Good domain name
-Hosting
-Have ability to deliver content within set quality times
-Be able to support a set amount of concurrent users
-Have capacity to store all content as needed.

5. Playing Lecture Video
-Video embedded in web page
-Well supported plugin on variety of platforms
-Youtube style videos
-Prevent user from saving videos to their computer
-Synced with lecture slides
-Wiki style notes
-Tabbed notes for public and private notes

6. Uploading Video
-Employed student uploads through site
-Video edited by team
-Video uploaded to corresponding unit/lecture on site
-Sync of Lecturer and Lecture slides

7. Security
-Secure user accounts
-Web security consideration
-Account Sharing

8. User Sign Up
-Confirm student enrolled at university
-Allow access to site to only those that are logged in and at that uni
-Securely store student information
-Ability for user to reset their password
-User terms and conditions

9. Paying For Video
-Secure payment method (such as google checkout or/and paypal)

10. Premium Users
-Has all features of free users but with the following added:
-Access to premium content lecture
-Access to downloadable lecture notes
-Unlimited access
-Contact method for unit co-ordinator
-Advert free
-IM with other course mates to ask functions via live messenger(Integrate into web page so you can ask questions to your coursemates via the web page to their IM client without divulging personal information such as email address)

11.Non-premiun User
-Access to lecture slides
-Area for own personnel notes
-Related adverts visible to non-premium users, e.g. course texts on amazon.

Business Specification

Recording of Lecture

The camera needs to be recorded in high definition at a minimum of 720p and 30fps and have a battery life and storage capability to last the length of the lecture that is being recorded so at a minimum should be able to last one hour but in certain cases be able to last 3 hours. In certain lecture theatres wall sockets may be available to facilitate the recording of lectures longer than the battery life of the camera however we should operate that for every 1 hour of lecture we need 2GB of storage to store the content.

The camera will need to have a high fidelity microphone so that it can pick up the lecturer’s voice and also any questions asked by student’s, this may be impossible in large lecture theatres so in those cases a separate directional microphone will be used which the camera operator can use to record the lecturer and also any questions asked by students.

The camera should be placed in the lecture room so that it can see the lecturer and if needed the board so that any information written on it can be recorded. As such the camera operator will be provided with a mini tripod that can be set up on the desk in front of them so as to provide a stable base for recording but will allow them to move the camera should they need to, this method will also produce the least disruption to other student’s in the classroom.

Uploading Video

After the lecture has finished the student will need to upload their recorded content. This will be done via the website. When the Employed student will log in to the website as normal but be redirected to a special employees section where there is the facility to upload a video to be edited.

Once the video has been uploaded a message will be sent to a team member informing him that a new video has been uploaded that needs preparing. The team member will use a piece of video editing software and load a preset profile to encode the video to a standard that is maintained across the website.

When the video editing is complete the team member will link it to the lecture and its other content online and it is ready to be viewed.

When a slide is change in the video the slide on the webpage will need to be changed. This could be achieved in two ways. The slides and video could be part of the same object on the webpage and the slide transitions would be hardcoded into the object. The second way could be to have the slides and video as two separate objects. Flags would be set in the video and when they are reached the object would tell the other object to change.

Playing Lecture Video

The videos of the lectures themselves will be embeded within the webpage and will feature controls such as pause, stop and a progress bar for users to scrub back and forth. This will prevent the average user from downloading the videos. Tests have been carried out to find out which video plugin would be best to use to meet our requirements. We need a plugin that would have a clear picture after compression and a low file size so it would load quickly. A video was recorded in High Definition at the highest resolution 1080p. It was then compressed with the same ratio on a range of diffrent plugins. These are the results:

Plugin	Size	Quality
Microsoft Silverlight	11mb	Excellent
Adobe Flash	8mb	Poor
Apple Quicktime	4.6mb	Good
Windows Media Player	5.5mb	Average

Below the video will be a notes section with a wiki style to allow users to take notes on the lecture that can either be public or private. The public section will allow for colaboration between students as they will be able to see each others work and contribute to each others learning.

Premium Users

Premium users will have access to all the features that non premium users have with a few extra and very important features. Access to video recording of the lecture which would be presented in a small window on the web page alongside the other premium content available for that lecture. Premium user access could also allow interaction between the unit co-ordinator and the students as well as the students being able to interact with each other. This could be done with a wiki style message board which would be accessable by premium users and unit co-ordinators. Advertising will be restricted for premium users, meaning less will be shown or none at all. This would be less intrusive for the user, as it can be distracting if they are trying to take notes of their own or revise for an exam.
A premium user is created when a non premium user pays a small fee for the premium content they purchased. This would possibly be done by unlocking all the premium feature options when the user makes a payment to the service and allows them to view the content that they purchased. The premium user would continue to be so until the account is closed down, but an account being closed down will be unlikely.
Other premium services that will be available to the premium user in relation to the content for a lecture that was purchased would include access to the notes that are related to the subject with unlimited access and a downloadable version available for offline use. Unlimited access could be provided by setting the user's account to allow viewing of the premium material they have purchased and not allow acces to the content they have not payed for.
Paying users will have access to all the the services available on the website and there will be no limitations of any sort. In order to become a paying user they would have to agree to the terms of service and pass the student authentication process. The lecture content provided by the university such as lecture slides will also be available to premium users but will not be a chargeable service.

Subscribed users will be able to view other course mates that have subscribed to that unit and see whether they are online or not by integrating windows live messenger. If a course mate is online they would be able to communicate with them via instant messaging to ask questions or chat about the unit. Students would be able to opt out of this service if they did not want to participate.

User Sign Up

When a user signs up to the service we need to ensure that they are actually enrolled at the university. To do this they will need to provide a university email address during the sign up process. A confirmation email will then be sent to that address that will contain a uniquely generated url that when is clicked on by the user will confirm they do own that address and thus are a student at the university. This email will be resent at the beginning of every university year to confirm that they are still a student. Once this step has been followed the user will then be able to access the content of the site and be able to buy premium content. The email address that they provide will be locked to their account and will not be allowed to be used with any other.

Allow access to site to only those that are logged in and at that uni
Access to the content of the site will only be available to logged in users that have a validated account as described above. On the main page of the site and also only any page that a unlogged in use attempts to view a login form will be presented. In this form the user will enter their username that will be their account’s main email address or username. They will also have to enter their password which they define when creating their account, the password will be stored in the user database in an encryption method such as md5. Once the user has logged in a cookie will be created on their web browser that will keep them logged in until they close their browser or manually sign out.

The user’s information will be kept in a sql database of either mysql or mssql depending on the language the site is written in. The database will be secured using a strong password and username and stored on a server in a physically secure environment. Most of the user’s information will not be encrypted however their password will by encrypted so will not be readable by somebody reading the database information. Only people who need to have access to the database for a specific reason will be given login credentials for the site and any access will be logged.

The user will have the ability to change all their details such as password and address except for their university email address from a my account page after they have logged into the site. The user will have to re-enter their current password before they can change it and during entry the password will be stared out.

To protect ourselves against any sort of problems within the content of the website which the user has added the user will have to agree to some terms and conditions. Some additions to these terms and conditions will be along the lines of whatever content the user uploads will be at that point belong to us and we will not be held responsible if the nature of the user added content is offensive or against any laws whoever we will take all possible measures to reduce the chance of that happening. If the user has an issues with the content they can get into contact with us and can be sorted out in a professional manner, also if any data is to be lost from using the service we will also not be held responsible. If the user acts in an inappropriate manner when using our service we will report it to the relevant authorities. The user will not be able to use our service if they refuse to agree to these conditions, which are allowed to be revised at any given point without an prior written warning.

Employed Student

An employed student is someone who attends their lectures and sets up the camera in the lecture theatre and records for the entire duration of the lecture. They would set up the camera so that it would capture the lecturer as he/she gave the lecture as well as any notes or drawing on the white board or projector screen. As an employed student they would receive a payment for their time and effort. This could be payed to them in a simlilar way as a normal user buying premium content except it would be in reverse and they would receive money. The employed students would have a history of payments made to them for the recording of the lectures. This could be presented as a spreadsheet style page that would tell them which lectures they have uploaded to the site and how much money they have received for the task.
A special login area would be available to the employed student to enable them to upload the recorded footage of a lecture as well as notes gathered. This could be done by having a special page which would take the video file that the camera created and upload it to the main storage server for inserting into the site for use by the premium students after the editing process was finished. Notes could be submitted to a wiki style page that can be displayed to them after the employed student has uploaded the video. This could either be submitted directly to the page related to the lecture by the employed student or sent off to someone else who will format and update the relevant page for the lecture.

System Interface

To select units an easy interface will be designed to allow students to quickly find the correct department’s units. Many students are familiar with maps of their university as they spent most of the first few weeks at uni looking at them trying to find their way around so would easily identify their building on a map. This is why the interface to find the departments will be in the form of a map. The student would be able to click on their department and a context window would appear containing the list of units organised by year.
The website will be made assessable for disabled users by having a special style sheet with larger fonts. This will be automatically loaded once the user has clicked the accessibility icon.

Security

Secure user accounts
As mentioned in the user sign up section they user’s details will be stored in a secured sql database that will use strong passwords and username and will be in a physically secure environment and only people who need to have access to the database will.

The university email address linked to the account will only be able to be changed by a site administrator and after the user has filled out a request form detailing why it needs to be changed. The previous address will then be blacklisted to prevent another account using it. The user will be able to access their details from a “my account” page on the site but they will need to re-enter their password before they are able to access this page and also enter again before they can change their password so as to prevent someone form accessing their details if the user leaves the computer whilst they are still logged in. The user’s payment details will be changeable but not viewable so as to prevent someone from having unauthorised access to the user’s bank details.

Web security consideration
The site will make use of https and encryption keys during the transfer of any secure information so as to prevent the man in the middle problem. The site will also use encrypted cookies with random security values to prevent someone from being able to spoof one and have unauthorised access to the site

Account Sharing
We need to be able to prevent customers from sharing a single user account thus reducing our revenue. To prevent this will will log how many different IP addresses the user has logged in with that day by having a counter field in their user account database and once they have reached a set amount their account will then become locked for the rest of the day. This will be explained in the EULA that the user agrees to when the sign up for the site and if they break it regularly will then suspend their account for longer and longer and then in a worst case scenario their account will be terminated.

Paying for content/video

To make the service as easy to use for the students the payment system will be provided externally by services such as PayPal, Google Checkout and World Pay. The students will simply select the product they would like on the website such as an individual lecture or semester payment and will be re-directed to one of these chosen methods. The student will have the option to choose which external service they wish to use and the payment will be directed to us. Following a successful payment the students account on the site will be allowed access to the requested content.
The processes of the payment must be made swiftly and easily as possible to not put off the student making the payment. These external services such as PayPal and Google Checkout offer all types of payment over the internet including Credit/Deb it card for ease of use. The student will be able to choose to setup an account with them to make One-Click future payments if they regularly use the site for pay-as-you go lectures.

Non-Premium user

Our non-paying users will still have access to our service but will only be limited; following they pass the student authentication process. As we will not be able to charge for the University provided lecture content, this will be made freely available to the registered non-premium users. They will see the website just like the premium user although if they try to access the video or other student wiki notes they will be asked to either upgrade their service or make a pay-as-you go payment.
For the non-premium users they will still have access to a wiki on the website along with the lecture slides/content which they can make notes with and save into their account for access later on. This hopefully will encourage them to upgrade to the full service to take advantage of our video setup. At this level access they will also be susceptible to adverts on the site (which are only educational) which may link them to Amazon for further reading book purchases.

Hosting/website

First of all we need a good domain name which is easy for the user to type in and remember. We currently now own www.mr-lecture.co.uk but always good to purchase the ones which type into the URL similar or very much reassemble and redirect the student to the same place. Below are some available domains which may need to be justified and purchased.

Domain	Available/not
Mr-lecture.com	Available
Mr-lecture.org.uk	Available
Mrlecture.org.uk	Available
Mrlecture.com	Taken, can try purchase from owner
Mrlecture.co.uk	Taken, can try purchase from owner
Missedthelecture.co.uk	Available

Dependent on merging with the University they may provide a sub-domain within their network. This will also provide access to the website to students directly inside the University’s network.
The hosting itself should provide a very fast speed of network access along with a high bandwidth limit because of the nature of the content it will hold. The hardware should be able to cope with high demands of multimedia content and provide methods of streaming video. The servers/network hosting the site should have load balancing setup to allow the ability of many concurrent users. Storage is a large requirement and will need to be high speed and of a large expandable type. Dependent on the length of time a lecture video and demand in popularity of a lecture video it should be able to determine this and put them in easier to access memory areas for speed.
Ideally we would be able to host the website on servers within the individual Universities campus, direct onto their internal network and made also available to students viewing from home. This will potentially cut down on storage costs as some lecture content is already stored internally. This would also benefit on the speed element although if we were to seek hosting elsewhere we would ensure it meets these specifications.

Knowledge of the customer

The founders of ‘Mr Lecture’ are all students. The founders saw a gap in the market for ‘Mr Lecture' and knew what students would want from the website. With a group of 8 students who all feel passionate about the concept of ‘Mr Lecture’, all put their ideas together to come up with the perfect study aid website.
Most students have missed a lecture while being at university. At present time the only way to catch up with the lecture is to use lecture slides that are always not available and to rely on class mates for help. ‘Mr Lecture’ is a service that students would pay for so they have a better method catching up on work. Exam periods can also be a hard time with some students struggling to find an effective revision method, ‘Mr lecture’ could be the missing link for some students offering lectures when ever needed.
Students have a very expensive time with university fees, rent, bills and of course nights out, therefore a normal student can not afford high prices. Low prices will appeal to students and the will hopefully use ‘Mr Lecture’ frequently. The low price of £1.00 per hour has been set. Most students receive a student loan to help them live at university, this is mainly spent but money is available for students and would use the money to help them gain the best grade possible.


Knowledge of Geographical Location
‘Mr Lecture’ will initially be rolled out in the electronic engineering department at the University of Portsmouth. In the department there are 750 students who are all possible customers. In time ‘Mr Lecture’ will be implemented in the whole University of Portsmouth and then other universities in the surrounding areas such as Southampton, Plymouth and Bournemouth. At the University of Portsmouth alone there is 20000 students who again are all possible students. Many students at the University of Portsmouth commute everyday and ‘Mr Lecture’ would be perfect the days travel is made difficult. The University of Portsmouth has students from all over the world and ‘Mr Lecture’ would allow help from any location even when not in Portsmouth.

Weakness In Existing Products
Many of the current products like Mr.Lecture are American based, recorded when guest speakers have come to either a university or an event. This means that although the topics are of an appropriate level their topics are rarely relevant to our course and those that are relevant do not go in to enough specific depth to assist the students that would be viewing our videos in their studies.

The videos hosted on Princeton University’s website although of variable formats, do not contain any lecture slides to assist the student with their studies. Furthermore, the layout of the site is not very user friendly. The videos here are not always relevant to the students who would be viewing the videos on Mr.Lecture. We would address this as our video’s would be recordings of lectures that are relevant to our course and as this would be complimented with the lecture slides from that specific lecture, it would assist the student to a much higher degree.

Freevideolectures.com is another site which is similar to Mr.Lecture. The weakness with this site is that it only provides links to the videos, which again are rarely as in depth as would be required by students. Mr.Lecture would address this as again, the material covered in the video’s is relevant to our course.

Academicearth.org shows a collection of notable speakers in various fields. Again these are not going to be 100% relevant to our course. Those that do pertain to the topics covered in the lectures that we attend would not go as in depth to cover all the material that is in our syllabus. There also appears to be no slides to go along with the video content to assist in the learning of the topics covered.

Examopedia although a lot more relevant to our topics (as it was created by one of the lecturers teaching our course) is limited to what it is capable of in that it only has a wiki section with links to slides. Mr.Lecture will make use of the same wiki idea that Examopedia uses, but will also offer the lecture slides in the same screen as the wiki so it will be easier and faster to use. Mr.Lecture will also incorporate video’s for paying customers.

Victory again is more relevant to our course as it is a learning environment designed for use at our university but is often unstable and hard to use. There are links to course material (slides, notes , announcements etc) throughout the site but it lacks the abilities to use video and the lecture notes in combination.

Studyzone is a site which enables its users to upload content and discuss topics relevant to study. Its major weakness is that the content that is uploaded is not of a high enough level to assist many in topics past GCSE and A levels. It is the fact that it is aimed generally from GCSE to University that is its main weakness.

YouTube.com, the most widely know online video site, where users can upload videos of anything for any reason. There are a few lecture videos posted up on the site, either by students or the lecturer. The site has a very good search, but the lectures aren't arranged properly. It can be a good resource if you know your lecturer has posted videos on there to view, but you cannot expect every one of your lectures to be up there to view related to your course.
There isn't a 'channel' as such so a university's lectures can be viewed in an easy to reach location (although the site does support such features).
More disadvantages to the site are the fact that the comments are unmoderated, and you get a lot of people posting rubbish which can detract from the page being viewed.
As said before, if your lecturer hasn't said that there are videos online, it's unlikely that any lecture you do watch will be related to your course. Something Mr. Lecture will change.

Vimeo.com, This is very much like YouTube but it is far less developed. The site layout is much cleaner, but the search function is nowhere near as good as YouTube's It has upload limits which are increased once you purchase a subscription. The site seems to be about where YouTube was a few years ago features wise.

Viddler.com, This online video site is again similar to Youtube but it has some interesting features, the most important one is the ability to 'bookmark' a section of video and have a link pop up on the screen or a text. this could be a useful feature to look at when wanting to synchronise the lecture slides with the playing video on our site. The ability to download the video without using an external Addon or plugin is another plus.


Legislation
As we will be showing video and content on our site used for revision purposes, we will need to take in to account laws and rights that govern video recordings and any copyrighted material that may be included in the lecturers lecture slides.
Video
The rights of ownership to video lies solely with the producer. This means that the Mr.Lecture team will own the rights to the videos of the recorded lectures completely. This also includes any distribution of the videos.
http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/video/articles/10667.aspx

Lecture slides
Before we show the lecture slides that were given out by the lecture we would need to make sure that there is no copyrighted material included in them. If there is content on the lecture slides we would need to either require removing from the content prior to being shown on the site, or acknowledging the source of the original content.
Rights of the Lecturer and other parties.
The lecturers have the rights to refuse to allow their lecturers to be recorded at any time.
The university may also request rights to use the videos for open days or for promotional use as they are being filmed on their premises. This would need to be discussed with the university and dealt with via a formal contract. Any video’s which are used for this purpose would require the Mr.Lecture team to label them “All rights reserved”.

Convenience

Firstly people will not just pay for the convenience of not having to physically go to the lecture we also believe that people will not remember the entire lecture and may want to view the lecture for a second time. This is a key part of Mr-lecture so lectures are not discouraged from allowing students to video the lecture. A Student could be viewing the lecture for the first time as they have missed it or they could be watching it for the 6th time right before an exam.
There is also the issue of in a lecture students may want to take note onto a notepad. Whilst a student is taking notes it is impossible for the student to be able to give 100% attention listening to the lecturer. With Mr-lecture the student would be able to listen to the lecture and once home from the lecture the student would be able to review the lecture whilst taking notes, the student would also be able to pause the lecture and write full notes from the lecture rather then having to have partial notes as the slide may have changed before the student could put all of which they had wished into their notepad.
With the option for you to make your notes communal means that you could look at other peoples notes and collaborate them with the students own notes. This could potentially bring to light parts of the lecture which the student may of missed.

There would be little activity from the user base before the exam period, then there will be many people wanting to view the lectures not only people that have missed the lecture but also people that would like to have some strong revision material. But the main question is how much will there people will be willing to pay and will the amount that the people willing to pay cover our expenses?
Hosting will cost Mr-lecture about £150 pounds a year to host; this would provide Mr-lecture with ample bandwidth to support users downloads from the website. The package would also include full support and would not be managed by ourselves. Meaning the cost would be a static figure. To support these costs A lecture would cost £1 per an hour £10 to view and entire 10 credit unit. Alternatively we could charge £50 for a term and in this case we would need to have few customers to make a profit. This would also try to fill the gap of people only wanting to view the lectures before the exams as £50 would be a nominal fee for the amount of material, making there be a big fan base.


Technology

Many a technology has become common place on website which has reduced the cost, had the technology become refined and openly available. The primary technology that has made Mr-Lecture a viable product is fast internet access commonly via broadband. Since the introduction of broadband to the general public the online video content on sites such as YouTube has shoot up at a vast pace. Now ( in may 2009) High quality video is openly accessible without the need to buffer before viewing the videos, This is also down to the powerful processors available at a low cost allowing more advanced codec’s such as MPEG-4 and DIVX.
Embedded objects in the HTML code also allows for the Design of Mr-lecture to embed the videos in different manors allowing the designers to me flexible. The lecture slices could also be made into adobe, Microsoft or any other proprietary method.


Costings for Users

Cost per hour	£1.00
Cost per Semester	£50
Cost per year	£100

Outgoings for Mr Lecture

paying employees	5% of taking for film
Hosting per year	£150
Cost of URL for 2 years	£6.99