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The California Department of Education (CDE) oversees a complex system educating more than six million students enrolled in California’s 10,000 public schools. With the help of Princeton, NJ based prime contractor ETS (Educational Testing Service), the CDE annually conducts the STAR Test which evaluates the academic performance of this diverse student body. Each year, video training materials are used to communicate important information concerning the STAR Test and its administration to 300,000 teachers state-wide. The training materials consist of approximately 55 different video segments on a set of two interactive DVD’s, and 15,000 DVD sets are produced for distribution.
Production Process The annual production of video training materials involves creating approximately 20 hours of new video footage each year. The editing process also draws from past years of archival material and includes gathering hundreds of graphics, covers and documents related to the test. Editing typically takes several weeks and requires multiple editors working simultaneously in geographically dispersed edit suites. The approval process includes academic experts and decision makers in San Antonio, Texas, Sacramento and Concord, California.
MAVRIC Media Hosted Database This year, longtime ETS sub-contractor, B.K. Productions decided to utilize the web to help make the production and approval process more efficient. BK Productions used MAVRIC Media’s on-line database tool, Asset Engine™ to create a hosted, CDE branded database to facilitate the entire STAR video project. This web-accessible database enabled creative team members to upload, download and share the countless media assets needed for the project. Individual video segments were available on-line in the CDE database well before the final mastering of the STAR DVD’s. The database ultimately hosted an interactive presentation consisting of 55 video segments. This on-line collaboration, editing, viewing and approval of the final DVD segments meant that segments could be quickly and conveniently reviewed and revised. Substantial time reduction and cost savings resulted from the elimination of shipping DVD’s back and forth to the content experts during the approval process. With the online database, these collaborators were able to closely follow the creative process and interact in a highly efficient manner and shorten editing time. Once the editing was completed and the content approved, there was another challenge for the team – accelerating the two to three week process of close-captioning the two+ hours of material and manufacturing and shipment of 30,000 DVD’s to 1,200 school districts. With many schools already urgently requesting access to the training materials, time became a critical issue.
Efficient Operations and Cost Effective Once again the MAVRIC Media database proved invaluable. Since video can be streamed to multiple viewers directly from the database, test site coordinators and administrators were given advance access to the material. In less than 48 hours, the CDE database became the online distribution hub for this material. STAR Site Coordinators and Test Administrators were given access to all finished content in a hosted environment where they could instantly view or download specific video segments.
The MAVRIC Media database enabled ETS to greatly enhance customer satisfaction, increase efficiency by reducing production time and costs. The acceptance of online distribution of CDE video training materials suggests that even more money might be saved by eliminating the shipment of DVD’s altogether, and moving to an entirely web-based distribution model using MAVRIC Media technology at www.mavricmedia.com/cde.
MAVRIC Media is a Northern California based ASP (application service provider) offering hosted software applications targeted at digital content creators and communications professionals. Their hosted DAM (digital asset manager) Asset Engine™ allows virtual organizations and their audience to collaborate, organize and share digital media in an online environment. Their content delivery solution BOOST™ is a high speed file transfer technology for sending large files or entire file directories up to 100x faster than traditional FTP methods. For more information visit www.mavricmedia.com | Ph. 800-804-7756
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