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The Columbia Video Network (CVN: www. cvn.columbia.edu) was established in the Fall semester of 1986 as an endeavor of Columbia University's Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Science. It was created as a tool to expand the reach of Columbia's engineering school beyond its physical Manhattan Campus location. Leading corporations in the engineering industries often approached the school to send faculty to teach courses on-site to their employees. Columbia found it increasingly difficult to continue to accommodate these requests, as limited faculty resources, bad weather, and other logistical concerns made this scenario very challenging.
To overcome this hurdle yet still continue to meet the learning needs of industry, Columbia sought to use technology to help bridge this divide. In this spirit, the Columbia Video Network (CVN) was formed. The program was originally offered to corporations within a 75-mile radius of the Columbia campus. The program began with six courses offered per term with approximately 6-8 students per course. The idea was to use available technology (VHS tapes at that time) in lieu of the professor's onsite corporate teaching. The lectures were recorded live on campus by the same faculty teaching local students, and the lecture tapes were then shipped to students to watch later at their own site.
The necessity of shipping tapes, course materials, and other documents made the process extremely labor intensive for CVN, sometimes resulting in delayed course access for students. As technology and Internet delivery were rapidly improving during the late 1990s, CVN began experimenting with delivering its coursework via streaming media over the Internet. By betatesting a few courses in streaming media, CVN was able to perfect this delivery mechanism, and shortly after, made all its coursework available over the Internet.
CVN's next innovation was to make its course lectures available to students via self-extracting downloadable files, which could then be played locally, direct from students' laptop computers, without requiring full-time Internet connectivity to view the lectures. This proved to be a boon to the CVN student body, which is highly mobile and constantly on the go. Students were thus enabled to watch lectures on trains, in airport waiting lounges, and everywhere else in between. CVN's most recent technology innovation was to enhance the size and viewing quality of the...