JANET Videoconferencing Case Studies: MAGIC

In its third year as of 2010, the MAGIC project aims to increase the number of courses offered in mathematics to postgraduates. The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council and uses Access Grid technologies to broadcast maths lectures to postgraduate students based at all of the partner sites.

Students are able to register their attendance, view the lectures and interact with students at other participating sites. An interactive whiteboard is used so that lecturers can annotate as they would in a usual face-to-face lecture, and a presentation is shared to all sites. All participants can communicate with each other and the lecturer either by speaking or by use of the instant messaging tool included in the software.

Professor Jitesh Gajjar, one of the project leaders said, "The project is creating a culture change in the way that we train our PhD students. Before MAGIC only a few of the large institutions had the resources to give postgraduate lecture courses. The smaller institutions with just a handful of research students were not in a position even to contemplate giving such training. Post-MAGIC, PhD students not only in the UK but also worldwide have access to live lectures and online resources in every area of mathematics."

At present the MAGIC project is part of a pilot project that is recording the lectures, building on work from the Collaborative Research Events on the Web Project (CREW) based at the University of Manchester, This will ultimately allow the users to see the recordings using Flash.

The MAGIC project currently has 19 participating sites, with more Universities waiting to join. With the exciting prospect of being able to record sessions easily and securely, the future of Access Grid technologies in teaching looks set to be highly successful.