The company I work for is really a firm that provides services and space to doctors and practitioners (we run a holistic medical center). Some of the practitioners have been expressing an interest in hosting online classes and courses, and I was wondering what problems/challenges others have run into trying to do something like this.
Right now our website is hosted by another company, and we have pretty decent bandwidth and GB caps on our current contract. I think what many of the practitioners would like to do is post documents, audio, and video to the website that authorized students/users would be able to access in order to complete their coursework, etc.
Since our webhost reserves the right to withhold the right for me to directly edit the .asp files (and not to mention that I’m not yet a wiz with .asp), I think I would just let them build the online course part of the website, as well as an administrative applet with which I could add files, new courses, and what not.
I guess my question would really be on the hardware side of things. Should I be looking into hardcore digital recording equiptment, or would buying/renting top-of-the-line consumer video and audio equiptment be sufficient? I would rather be stuck finding ways to shave megabytes off movie and audio files, rathen then trying to make hard-to-see/hard-to-hear audio/video files more usable – you know what I mean?
Any basically, any other problems I might run into? Other’s past experiences with trying to do something like this? Any help/info/resources/comments would be very useful. Thank you all!