dear mediacore team!
I am philosophy student and speak for a group of students and members of the Philosophy Department at the University of Vienna. we use mediacore to distribute academic content ranging from lectures, interviews, discussions to radio-shows and congresses. see our webpage: http://phaidon.philo.at/mediacore
we love mediacore and believe it has huge potential and is likely to become an alternative and/or supplement to iTunes U for the purpose of publishing academic content - especially in the German speaking world, where open courseware and Creative Commons are about to boom.
for the purpose of publishing academic content we would find the implementation of some of the following features very helpful. we are philosophers and no software-engineers though, so please don't be offended if some of our ideas seem slightly, umm, utopical :)
crucial:
1. a plugin allowing to establish a worldwide connection between the faculties and univiersities using their own mediacore-platform – through, say, a simple drop-down list?
2. an alternative would be some kind of main page through which one could navigate to a certain university, college or department
3. applying categories/tags/evaluations not only to single episodes but podcasts. we have far too many podcasts by now already to be navigated in list-view.
4. a plugin allowing not only to „like“ or „dislike“ a lecture but adding further optional choices like „comprehensible“, „advanced“ asf.
optional:
5. when we use longer lecture titles in the categories, as the font does not become smaller in the sub-categories, we are soon out of space. would be great if one could change thefont-size of sub-categories.
utopic but the following would definitively make mediacore an iTunes U "killer":
6. listeners get their own channel where they can share their uploads/playlists/listening-histories/likes-dislikes
7. some solution to easily add notes to an audio-lecture while the notes are displayed as a video. in youtube for example one can easily add text to videos or audio-files. this is what we have in mind but with the possibility to allow certain members of the site to add the notes. this would allow users to browse a lecture and get some idea of what the actual content is about without having to open a text-file or listen to the whole lecture. they would further be able to jump to a specific place in an audio-file knowing what they are about to hear.
8. one should be able to categorize/tag the notes themselves: it is like being able to "highlight" certain notes and use a category to do so. some notes would thus immediately become visible as "thesis", others as "counterthesis" or "refutation", "contradiction" asf. the idea is that THESE categories would be made visible in form of, say, background color of the actual text and not (only) in the „categories“ tab. the idea is to not only apply the tags and categories to the whole video but further differentiate which part of the media-file the tag or category actually belongs to.
keep it up, great work! we advertise for mediacore as much as we can!
