DURHAM, N.C. - A new Duke University website pulls together videos from across campus, highlighting speakers, research findings, live events and more.

The new "Duke on Demand" site represents a higher-education version of video sites such as Hulu that have emerged in recent years; it is available at http://ondemand.duke.edu.

The site's recent offerings range from a discussion of the ethics of paying for organ donations to a series of campus pranks by the Blue Devil mascot to a conversation about global health challenges. There are nearly 2,000 videos now on the site and more are added daily.

"You can think of ‘Duke on Demand' as a kind of online TV channel that is constantly broadcasting the best of what goes on at Duke," said Michael Schoenfeld, Duke's vice president for public affairs and government relations. "Students, alumni and anyone else looking for interesting material can watch whenever it's convenient for them."

Visitors to the site can watch videos highlighted on its main page or search by topic or keyword. A live events schedule lists upcoming webcasts. Visitors can view the videos within the Duke on Demand site or on other sites where they appear, such as iTunesU, YouTube or Big Think. Visitors can also suggest a Duke-related video to add to the site.

"The volume of online video material generated at Duke has been increasing exponentially in recent years," said Tracy Futhey, Duke's vice president for information technology and chief information officer. "What's technically elegant about Duke on Demand is that it is platform-independent, which provides us an easy way to present videos from many different systems and positions us to adapt to future Internet video formats."

Duke on Demand is based on the Miro open-source technology (http://www.mirocommunity.org) developed by the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation. Questions about submitting videos to Duke on Demand can be sent to ondemand@duke.edu.