Excellence Gateway Television
In collaboration with leading multimedia production house, Healthy Media, I devised and implemented Excellence Gateway Television (EGTV), an online video news and information channel dedicated to the learning and skills sector. Specially commissioned reports were aired at regular intervals and video content from stakeholder organisations was also made available.
Technically, EGTV was based on widely adopted web standards with video suitable for playback on Windows, Apple Mac and portable devices such as Apple iPod but the player was fully integrated with the existing LSIS Excellence Gateway content management system.
The Akamai content delivery network was utilised to enable hundreds of simultaneous users to access the videos without significantly impacting the existing LSIS infrastructure and accessibility issues were properly considered through the provision of transcripts and good design.
The EGTV technical platform evolved constantly over the first two phases of the project and a further phase of development (Phase 3) was prepared for rollout but never released.
Enhancements ready to rollout as part of Phase 3 included:
Full integration with EG single sign on functionality
Full compatibility with new browsers: Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3 and Google Chrome
Addition of a universal ‘tracker bar’ allowing users to skip to any segment of the video regardless of format
Addition of time information: current time code and duration
Updating of buttons and layout to more closely match BBC iPlayer
Addition of accordion style channel navigation
Prior to the recent strategic repositioning of the LSIS Excellence Gateway service, EGTV was seen as a key vehicle for supporting LSIS programmes and initiatives, providing additional interest on the LSIS Excellence Gateway and thus achieving increased levels of user interest and engagement. EGTV was extremely successful in raising the profile of the Excellence Gateway as a whole and feedback from both users and partners was consistently positive.
The success achieved by EGTV showed how the use of video-based resources can enhance the accessibility of key content and messages to people working in the sector. The individual films proved the potential to add value to national support programmes, providing stimulating examples of good practice which could be centrally produced or uploaded by users involved in national projects or other supported activities (e.g. by JISC RSCs, NIACE, Ofsted, etc).
Copyright John Pitman 2020