re: video

Sorry for anyone who watched this video thinking it was supposed to be here. It wasn't. We had some issues embedding the video (that you saw ?part? of, without sound), so I tried putting it here as a test. (Don't worry, it's only a boring explanatory video on JMU switching to direct lending of financial aid. View a full version here, if you really want to. I did edit it, but it is not good, and it's way long.)

You see, we typically upload any video we make onto YouTube, which very conveniently auto-generates an embed video code that can be used to put the video, at any size we wish, on any site we control. Unfortunately, YouTube only allows videos up to 10 minutes, unless you are a paid subscriber (JMU is not, and this video is ~17 minutes long). So instead, we tried for the first time to host the video through JMU's in-house video sharing resource, JMUtube. It has a standalone, unique player that can be embedded on any site and which does not need any plugin for anyone to view it (such as Quicktime). Unfortunately, JMUtube still has some bugs, and for some reason was stripping the video of audio.

After a full day of going back and forth on what to do, including hosting the video on our own server and embedding it simply as a Quicktime movie (which couldn't be sized down on our server), we decided to make a short 2 minute teaser from the beginning of it, and then provide a link to the full movie in Quicktime format. I know this was a very boring post, but just wanted to explain to anyone who saw it in its earlier form!