Many people are out to re-invent education as a “flipped classroom“, in which learning and interaction is carried out remotely and digitally. Tokbox CEO Ian Small agrees video is just the medium to support the idea.
“WebRTC on its own solves the one-to-one, peer-to-peer (video) case reasonably well,” he tells Beet.TV. “But what it doesn’t really help you with is four, five, 10 or sometimes even 20 people engaged in a live video environment.”
That’s what San Francisco-based Tokbox’s OpenTok, a set of APIs to leverage and build on the WebRTC video standard, sets out to address. Small says EngineHere, the latest in services to help people learn how to program, uses OpenTok to pump around its its live video learning experiences between multiple participants.
“In 2014, what you’re going to start to see are applications rolling out … that really start to change people’s perception about what it means to engage with someone on the web,” Small says. “It used to be about text, these days it’s going to be about audio and video.”
