About UCTV Seminars

With hundreds of seminars, conferences and colloquia taking place each week across the University of California system, it's nearly impossible for today's scholar to keep up. While many scholarly presentations are posted online after the fact, they often end up buried in departmental or conference websites, making it difficult for anyone unaware of the event to discover on their own.

The new UCTVSeminars web portal offers a simple, cost effective solution by providing a single destination for scholars to find and share peer-to-peer scholarly presentations in any academic discipline via video and visual media. All presentations originate from a University of California campus or affiliated institution and feature researchers from universities around the world. Built using UCTV's existing online dissemination infrastructure and experience organizing large video collections for prime search engine optimization, UCTV Seminars makes this specialized content accessible on an unprecedented scale.

Features

• Simple web-based upload service allows contributors to submit video presentations and affiliated metadata online. Learn more about submitting content to UCTVSeminars or go directly to the UCTV Uploader.
• Easy-to-navigate user interface allows visitors to browse by subject area, event date, speaker, conference, host organization or UC campus
• Flash video or video podcast download options
• Videos also available at UCTV's iTunesU channel and the UCTVSeminars YouTube channel
• RSS feed provides automated updates with new content as it becomes available

Video Requirements

As a web-only service focused on scholarly content (and not intended for television broadcast), a simple, narrated PowerPoint video file is all that is required. This can be recorded directly from a computer during the presentation. Of course, more highly produced content is welcomed as well.

Background

For over eleven years, UCTV has gathered and disseminated general interest programming from throughout the University of California to more than 23 million homes nationwide on satellite and cable, and worldwide on its website www.uctv.tv and YouTube and iTunesU channels. While in-depth and, at times, challenging, UCTV's content is intended for the general public, with additional content aimed at health care professionals and K-12 teachers. With more than ten million online video views each month, UCTV is clearly connecting with these on-line audiences.

As UCTV has grown, UC faculty have expressed interest in making seminar presentations available to fellow scholars online while also having access to other seminars from throughout the system. Unlike videos created for broadcast, these scholarly presentations require less production effort— minimally just the audio and the PowerPoint of the presentation.

While some departments and conference organizers offer these kinds of presentations online after a seminar or conference has occurred, most are lost to anyone not directly participating. And, with hundreds of events occurring each week, it is virtually impossible to participate in as many as one might like. As a proven aggregator and disseminator of video content, UCTV is applying its proven expertise by both surfacing and then distributing this valuable content to interested audiences inside and outside the academy.