Sonic Foundry Webinar Features Leading Analyst Firm's Top Four Considerations for Campus-wide Lecture Capture

MADISON, Wis. - June 11, 2009 - Sonic Foundry, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the recognized market leader for rich media webcasting and knowledge management, announces an exclusive webcast, "A Recommended IT Roadmap for Campus-wide Lecture Capture: Your Courses Online Now." A featured Gartner analyst discusses why lecture capture is important to consider now, and best practices for deployment and partner selection. Also in the webcast, experts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore and Sonic Foundry outline recommendations for navigating both the challenges and opportunities of enterprise lecture capture.

Campus-wide lecture capture is growing based on student expectations to have anytime, anywhere access to content, and the need of campuses to leverage technology to build new online learning opportunities in the current economic climate.

"One of the most important assets of any university or college is the knowledge being created every day by professors in the classroom," said Monty Schmidt, founder and CTO of Sonic Foundry. "Capturing that information gives institutions the ability to reach new audiences and expand class sizes. It also gives students the ability to actually listen to the professor instead of scrambling at note taking."

In the Gartner report dated February 25, 2009, Getting U.S. Getting U.S. Higher Education Through a Bad Economy With E-Learning and Social Software, Gartner research analyst Marti Harris reported that "The Gartner 2008 e-learning survey showed that more than 55% of all courses offered were fully online or hybrid courses. According to the survey, the top motive that respondents cited for using e-learning was ‘meeting student demand,' followed by ‘providing pedagogical advances' and ‘meeting faculty demand.'"

In the webcast, featured presenter Harris cites the number one issue to consider when choosing a lecture capture platform is ease-of-use. "Faculty members are not going to use a system that isn't easy to use in the classroom or lecture hall. It's also important that students find it easy to use when they're working online or offsite," said Harris.

Harris expands on three more key considerations for going enterprise-wide including: 

• Identify an early win to inspire and mentor other departments
• Integration with your course management system and other campus technology 
• Compatibility with the vision of your lecture capture provider

The University of Maryland, Baltimore Dental School launched Mediasite as part of the dean's vision to use multimedia presentations to change learning methodology and provide individualized instruction to its students. The early win was realized when survey results of faculty and students showed both groups had a positive attitude toward Mediasite for lecture capture. After a second successful deployment at the School of Pharmacy, the university unfolded an enterprise-wide Mediasite program that included the Schools of Nursing, Law and Social Work as well as Central IT.

"We saw Mediasite as a platform that would benefit the entire enterprise. We asked ourselves, could we build an enterprise-wide agreement that would be an effective financial model to other departments? Could we effectively build a high availability Mediasite architecture leveraging the backend technology and services in the centralized IT organization? For all of these questions and others the answer was yes," said Dr. Peter Murray, vice president and chief information officer at UMB. "I would encourage any institution that is focusing on putting content online, and specifically lecture capture content, to look at Mediasite as a solution."

"Since the beginning we have adhered to two main tenets for lecture capture with Mediasite. First, do not change the way the presenter presents. We want to make sure people are able to teach in the manner they're used to teaching," said Monty Schmidt, founder and CTO of Sonic Foundry. "Second, quickly get the course online to students with as little post production as possible. For example, take 10 classrooms running four hours of class every day. Uploading and post-production time adds up. Mediasite successfully automates that entire process, allowing you to rapidly expand lecture capture throughout the entire university."

To watch the complete webcast, "A Recommended IT Roadmap for Campus-wide Lecture Capture: Your Courses Online Now," visit www.sonicfoundry.com/itroadmap.