Today, schools and universities are more connected around the globe than ever before. Before the rise of the Internet, options to engage with students from other countries were very limited. Students needed to enroll in Study Abroad programs or attend international conferences to meet students in other countries and share ideas. These options were only available to students who could afford to pay to stay overseas, who didn’t have jobs outside of school, children, or other stateside responsibilities to attend to. Technology has democratized this process, however, making worldwide student interaction possible anywhere there are Internet connections and digital devices.
Educators can give their students a valuable global perspective by leveraging this technology to foster connections between students all over the world. The good news is that it’s never been easier to do this, thanks to online content delivery systems such as TikiLIVE.
This revolutionary platform integrates live streaming, video on demand, social media, and device-independent encoding, all within a powerful hosting infrastructure you can rely on to seamlessly close the distance and build a bridge to understanding for students around the world, all at an affordable price. Let’s look at some ways TikiLIVE can help you make these connections.
Overseas Students Can Attend Your Lectures Without leaving Their Dorms
Let’s say you meet a fellow academic from another country at an international conference in your field of scholarship, and the two of you get excited about getting your students to share ideas and see the class material from each other’s cultural perspectives. What better way for this to happen than sitting in on each other’s class lectures, discussions, or labs?
In the past, university classes in different countries had to share lecture material via transcripts, or by mailing audio or videotapes – not a very speedy or reliable way to exchange ideas. Videotaping lectures also involved setting up an expensive camera and having it operated by someone who hopefully knew what he or she was doing, with sometimes less than ideal results.
With an online content delivery platform such as TikiLIVE, however, you can live stream your lectures directly to an IPTV channel that you can set up for your class. The overseas students would just need to tune in their computers, tablets, or smartphones to the channel and get the immediate experience of attending one of your lectures, live.
No specialized knowledge or recording devices are required; with TikiLIVE, you can broadcast your lectures from a digital video camera, or even a tablet or smartphone. HTML5 encoding ensures that your video can be watched on any platform or mobile device, whether PC or Mac, iPhone or Android, iPad, or Windows tablet. Our robust infrastructure ensures that your high-quality video is delivered without drops, buffering, or other lapses. If time zones prevent overseas students from viewing your lectures live, TikiLIVE makes it easy to archive your recorded lectures to be viewed on demand.
Bring Your Guest Lecturers to the World
For the most part, your students’ overseas peers are physically limited by geography when it comes to guest lecturers and other experts they get to learn from. If you teach an agricultural sciences course and you schedule a guest lecture with a world-renowned crop scientist, wouldn’t you like to be able to share that experience with students all around the globe who could benefit from it?
With TikiLIVE, you can live stream the guest lecture and dramatically increase the number of students the speaker’s information reaches worldwide. If you have contacts at overseas schools, you can invite them to tune in, or put out a general invitation using TikiLIVE’s social media integration.
TikiLIVE’s Social Media Tools Bring The World Closer to Your Students
One of social media’s greatest strengths is its ability to connect people around the world with common interests, and TikiLIVE’s social media integration can help you reach students around the world to discuss your class’s subject matter and activities.
Teaching a course on 18th-century English literature? Create an open Facebook group for your class and share video of your class lectures and discussions there. Hosting a seminar led by a world-renowned expert on particle physics? Send a tweet with a link to where students around the world can tune in on your TikiLIVE channel. Hosting an international conference for textiles professors and students? Record the proceedings and upload them to YouTube for students everywhere to view.
TikiLIVE shares your content to all of these social media platforms seamlessly, greatly extending your class’s reach and inviting participation from fellow scholars around the globe, who can then share your video on their own social media feeds and reach other like-minded scholars. TikiLIVE’s social tools also enable you to create chat rooms for real-time discussions on your course’s subject matter, as well as threaded message boards where students from all parts of the world can get to know each other and exchange their ideas and knowledge.
Global Reach That Is Within Your Budget
Departmental budget constraints are a reality that every academic has to work with while still providing the most enriching educational experience possible for their students. TikiLIVE delivers unparalleled value to your department by bringing your classes to the world stage while eliminating the travel expenses that traditionally have gone with sharing your expertise overseas, as well as the expensive equipment previously needed to record lectures. TikiLIVE also documents your lectures and academic activities for archiving, providing your department with educational resources that can be used for years to come. All this educational power can be yours for a price that will likely surprise you.
TikiLIVE can truly help you close the distance between your students and their fellow students worldwide. We would be honored to help you deliver your class to students anywhere in the world there is a Wi-Fi connection and a digital device. Give us a call at (305) 289-4557 or contact us online to learn more or get set up!
