The National University of Singapore clinched the Best Business Enabler (Education) prize in the recent MIS Asia IT Excellence Awards 2005 for its groundbreaking webcast project –NUScast.

In its sixth year, NUScast is continually growing from strength to strength. From its humble beginnings as a pilot project, NUScast has become a cornerstone in NUS. Students find NUScast indispensable, watching live and archived lectures on a daily basis.

CIT's Flexible Education team and staff from various Faculties and
Schools who are involved in NUScast celebrate the Award

During Semester II AY 2004/2005, there were nearly 2000 hours of webcast lectures. At the time this article was written, during Semester I AY 2005/2006, there were almost 2500 hours of webcast lectures - and counting! NUScast is, without a doubt, one of the university's most utilized IT teaching tools.

NUScast screenshot showing live desktop. Click for a larger screenshot

CIT continually seeks to improve NUScast. This year, video webcasts have been supplemented with audio lectures. These are either podcast through RSS feeds, downloaded directly from IVLE or played as streaming files.

What really impressed one of the awards judges, according to MIS Asia, was that our homegrown project managed to provide substantial additional value to the NUS community at low cost and with relative implementation ease. The evaluator commended the team on the simplicity and effectiveness of our solution.

The team responsible for webcasts includes CIT staff as well as staff from various Faculty IT Units and Audio-Visual Units, Technical Support Divisions and Departments. NUScast would not be the success it is today without the dedicated effort throughout the Faculties, Schools and Departments. All of the staff who have worked on or have a stake in NUScast should be rightly proud of their contribution to this NUS success.