By Jeff Cohen, Assistant Director, CUOL
As you may have heard, Carleton University has stopped airing recorded courses on local cable television after 37 years of service. Although Carleton University OnLine (CUOL) will no longer be available on Rogers Ottawa Digital Cable, we are very excited to announce that the CUOL channel will be online 24/7!
This means that the Carleton programming traditionally available on cable TV will still be available to our students, the local community and anyone else anywhere in the world with access to the Internet. Schedule information will be available on our website.
What started as itv 37 years ago with a handful of courses on the new technology of cable television, and originally broadcast through the Skyline Cable and Ottawa Cable companies, has grown into CUOL, with well over 100 courses offered each year. In recent years it has become clear that fewer students use television to access courses and that the move to digital cable in a thousand channel universe has all but eliminated casual viewership by the public.
Almost all our students access CUOL courses online, whether using our Video on Demand service, live streams or on-campus viewing in the Student Centre or the Library, or through cuLearn in the case of our rapidly growing catalogue of web-based courses. We have also been simultaneously webcasting the channel programming going out to Rogers Ottawa and we suspect most of the channel viewership is actually via the web, not over cable TV.
All of us at CUOL extend our sincere gratitude to Rogers Cable and the preceding Ottawa cable companies for the many years of partnership delivering educational programming to the Ottawa area and we hope you enjoy the new online service!