In October 1998, I began work as a Producer/Director in what was then called the Centre for Academic and Media Services (CAMS) at Memorial University of Newfoundland. This unit delivered distance education courses, using correspondence, cassette tapes, and increasingly video tapes. The media unit was what remained of ETV, an educational television channel, that had been cut a few years earlier in a round of belt-tightening. I worked there for fifteen years, until my retirement in 2014. The workload was varied, from closed-circuit live psychology lectures, to promotional videos for various academic departments, and occasionally meatier projects, such as the ones I have listed here. Over the years, as technology changed, and even MUN went digital, the methods of delivering courses changed. After VHS came DVD, and eventually everything was streamed online. The name of our department changed too, first to Distance Education and Learning Technologies (DELT) to Distance Education, Learning and Teaching Support, (DELTS) to its current name, Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL).
The working situation at MUN was very different from what I was used to. There was no hiring of a crew or renting equipment on a project by project basis. The camera operators and the editor were all on staff, and the necessary equipment was already on hand. We even had our own cars and trucks. The five producer/directors did have to share the available resources, but it was rare that something agreeable couldn’t be worked out. We didn’t have the money for hiring musicians for soundtracks and mostly had to use a canned music service – I think that’s the thing I notice the most, watching these now.