Benefits of System-Wide Lecture Capture: How the University of Tennessee Saved Time, Cut Costs and Increased Service

Hello and welcome to our continuing series of live

webinars documenting creative use

Mediasite around the world.

I'm Sean Brown, Vice President of Education and today's

webinar is titled "Benefits of System-Wide Lecture Capture:

How the University of Tennessee Saved Time, Cut

Costs and Increased Services".

Once again, we have an extremely large audience of

people joining us from around the world, including almost

300 people online right now.

We have universities, corporations, and government

agencies from all 50 US states-- you

know that I like that--

and representative institutions from all

provinces in Canada.

Also, we have people joining us from countries in every

single continent , around the world including some first

time international guests from Romania, Sweden, Colombia,

Ecuador, and China.

Welcome to you all.

Some housekeeping information for you watching the

presentation today.

We are streaming in two of our Mediasite interfaces.

You're either looking at us through our advanced player,

which has a mostly black background, or you might be

looking at us via our classic player, where the presenter

information is against a white background.

In either case, you will notice that there is a speech

bubble that looks like a speech bubble in the cartoon.

If you click on this icon, you will be able to ask me and our

guest a question.

I will receive your questions here at the desk and will hold

them all until the end.

And relay them to our guest when he's done

with his formal remarks.

In addition, if you'd like to include your email address,

which is optional when ask a question, in case I don't have

time with this large audience to get to all your questions,

we can follow up with you when we're offline later on, which

my guest has agreed to do.

In both interfaces, you will notice a couple of links

together, a links icon.

This contains additional supplementary information

about this presentation, including the PowerPoint

slides that are being used by guest in his presentation.

Now, I would like to introduce my guest, an

old friend, Bob Hillhouse.

Bob has served both his community and the nation in

bringing his technical expertise to a variety of

roles throughout the years, including a stint in the Navy.

Bob Hillhouse is currently the executive director for

application support at the University

of Tennessee system.

In his former role as director of engineering services at

University of Tennessee, he was responsible for providing

video conferencing, web streaming services, classroom

technical support, residence hall closed circuit

surveillance systems support, and most exciting of all to

me, game day engineering support for the University for

broadcast major athletic events.

It's my pleasure to welcome a key adviser to Sonic Foundry

for years, an old friend, Bob Hillhouse, to headquarters

here in Madison.

Welcome.

Thanks, John.

I had to get up to get to warm weather.

It's actually worse weather in Knoxville down where I'm from.

Rarely the case.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate the introduction and before we get started, I

want to go through, give you some background on the

University of Tennessee.

The University of Tennessee system is composed of four

campuses located in Chattanooga, Knoxville,

Memphis, and Martin, Tennessee.

There's also three institutes, the Institute of Public

Service, the Space Institute, and the Ag Institute on the

campus in Knoxville.

So it goes without saying that we're spread out pretty thin.

We're all over the state.

It's 400 miles from Knoxville to Memphis, so you can see

that we're going to be stretched thin as far as

communicating with all these disparate campuses.

We've got about 48,000 students enrolled at the

University of Tennessee and between

12,000 and 14,000 employees.

There's quite a constituency there to communicate with.

As you can see, just from the diagram, from the picture,

that we're spread pretty geographic.

There's geographic diversity there but with technology the

way it is today, and broadband capabilities that we've got,

and the technology we're using, it shortens those

distances and really gets our message out there.

Engineering services.

Shawn introduced me is the director of application

services, but prior to that as director of engineering

services, I was blessed to lead a group of engineers that

provided all the services he outlined to you, everything

from video conferencing, live archived web streaming, a

classroom technical support, game day

engineering as Shawn mentioned.

And the joke is always, if it's sound or if it's

pictures, engineering services is involved.

We always tell people if you don't like what's on the

Jumbotron, talk to the coach.

But if you can't see it, don't call us because we're usually

scrambling to try to make sure that the

picture comes back on.

We also provide support to the campus as far as cable

systems, a closed circuit surveillance, so again sound

and pictures, this department's involved.

You might think there's about 300 people

involved in that exercise.

There's 13, and these folks are spread across the

different divisions in the department.

From video conferencing, they focus on just the video

conferencing and TANDBERG systems, to classroom

technology support.

On any given day this group of 13 combines its efforts to

provide the game day engineering support.

There's a serious amount of cross training, flexibility.

These folks are gunslingers.

They're not typical IT people.

I just can't stress that enough in that they're not

scared of the technology but they're used to working in an

environment of broadcast engineers where

things have to work.

They have to work in real time and they don't have a lot of

patience for equipment that fails.

We were given a mandate several years ago when this

particular group of engineers was brought into the IT

organization.

We were given a mandate actually to provide

webcasting.

And so the group went out looking at different solutions

for providing this service and we evaluated three or four

different systems at the time.

This is 2005, so it's been some time ago, and some of the

features that we were looking at and some of the challenges

that we had to address, the request we have to address,

was this geographic distance problem that we had.

So we had to learn how to distribute this information,

whether it was from an athletic event, whether it was

from a commencement, whether it was from a meeting of the

Board of Trustees, or the president just wanting to talk

to the campuses.

We were looking at to satisfy several different criteria.

The streaming services that we use currently at the

University of Tennessee provide this lecture capture,

this support for meetings, and the campus wide event

communications.

But when we were evaluating this, we were

looking for an appliance.

We were looking for something that worked

right out of the box.

One of the things that you have got to understand about

the University of Tennessee, specifically about engineering

services, is that they're broadcast engineers.

We were looking for solution that wouldn't require

programming, wouldn't require us to bring in a series of

folks to design websites.

We needed something that we can take right out of the box.

We can plug in and it would work.

The solutions that we looked at, the Mediasite, was the

solution we decided upon.

A couple reasons for that.

One was the fact, again, that we didn't have to build

screens, that we didn't have to hire consultants to come in

and set it up, that it did work, directly just right out

of the box.

Some of the things that we experienced with some of the

other solutions we looked at was that it required a desktop

client, when we needed something that would blend

with what we already had at the desktops.

It's something that integrated with Microsoft, which was our

predominant base of users.

It wasn't a question of building something.

It wasn't a question of piecing together something.

We needed to buy a complete solution right out of the box.

Some of the examples that we have of our streaming, and

I'll go through these with you quickly, demonstrate some of

the different varieties of requests that we get for

webcasting.

One of these, first example I'll show you, was basically a

synchronous learning project, or pilot, where we actually

use the Sprint Broadband card out on location and geological

outcropping to capture the event and stream it back into

the classroom, using video conferencing, and then as a

blended technology, capture the entire

session using Mediasite.

One of the things that we are looking into now is how we can

extend that broadband past what the Sprint provides.

One of the first challenges is that, after we established

Mediasite as our platform of user and the University, was

that we realized right out of the box, that we could not

scale this solution with just one person

and a couple of boxes.

We soon realized that we were going to have to automate a

lot of the features.

We couldn't send a person out every time there was an event

to capture.

So, we went from two boxes and two mobile recorders to

roughly 23, 25 devices, and we implemented automatic tracking

systems in classrooms. Now, these aren't classrooms that

you typically would--

they're not studios.

These are typical classrooms where we've gone in and put

Smart technologies, like Sympodium, audio tracking

systems, NEC monitors, TANDBERG video conferencing

equipment, and the idea is that the instructor can come

in and conduct his class just like he would in a normal

environment, but capture the class and stream it out to the

audience, whether that's for the purposes of distance

learning, or whether it's for the purposes of just capturing

the class to allow the students to view this on an

on-demand basis.

This is another classroom where we have actually

implemented the audio tracking system with a

mat behind the monitor.

One of the things, when you're not dealing with studios in

studio classrooms is that you never know what classroom

you're going to be handed to outfit with this technology.

In this particular classroom, there's typical AMX control

panels, rack unit, mat on the floor, and audio tracking

system, and then a projector for the classroom.

In several of the examples that I'm going to show you or

have shown you, this is a blended environment of video

conferencing with webcasting.

We find that the video conferencing, where it lands

to aggregate communication, at points across the state or

around the globe, in this case, the Mediasite allows us

to extend that to our audience by capturing this output and

then streaming it live, or on-demand, as the case may be.

This particular conference was with Central America and was

purely a video conference that was captured and then used and

webcast. I think that the participants in webcast

audience were larger than the participants

we had at each end.

I throw this slide in here just to show you some of the

things that, when you have a bunch of gunslingers working

for you and want to do closed captioning, this is an example

of where we were capturing an event, where there was someone

off screen actually encoding this,

captioning this to the web.

We were capturing that particular webstream using a

Sony Anycast, doing just a typical broadcast maneuver,

one-third screen at the bottom to show the live captioning.

So it's a different twist to approach a problem, which is

what these guys typically do.

This is an example of standard captioning that we do when

we're capturing a commencement.

This commencement at University of Tennessee is not

a small event, as you might imagine.

When that event is held, a video production crew actually

comes in and we actually take their feed.

So the standards are very high for the video so we have to

have the best delivery we can of that particular signal.

When the University wanted to launch a future celebration or

development project, $1 billion fund drive, we met as

a university across the state using video conferencing with

all four campuses and the Ag Institute, and offices around

the state involved in a video conference.

We also captured it and streamed it out to the folks

that couldn't be on location in each of these events.

And of course typically, we meet just like every other

university system does, or any organization does, our Board

of Trustees meets with the administration to discuss

policies and tuition hikes or what the budget situation is.

We use that as a way of capturing and communicating

that message out to the state and to the

constituents at the campus.

Shawn mentioned athletics and I wanted to

throw this slide in.

We currently do not stream any athletic events live.

We were asked to test the technology to see how the

technology would work.

I think the results were really a lot better than what

we've seen out of some other platforms. When I say other

platforms, what ESPN does with their ESPN 360, they were

amazed at the quality that we were getting.

Right now, with all the rules around the NCAA, it's still a

project that we talk about but currently they're still just

going with their typical distribution method and that's

ABC and NBC and ESPN.

And that wraps it up.

I was going to take some questions.

Well, great job.

Thank you for doing your prepared remarks.

I've heard of those guys, NBC, ABC, ESPN.

Those are the kind of guys you rolled with before Mediasite

got on campus.

There's a lot of questions coming in and I'm going to

just jump right in if that's OK with you.

That's fine.

So I'm going to start with the hardest ones first. A lot of

people have asked in different ways--

I think one of our friends asked it the best-- you said

you started with one person and two mobiles, and then

moved up to 25+ recorders plus somehow.

How many people did you have to add to go to this campus

system-wide deployment?

That's a good question.

I don't want to mislead you.

We did grow the system to 25 machines but the majority of

those machines are rack machines.

And they're distributed--

So they're permanently installed systems.

That's correct.

That's correct.

And they're distributed across the university system.

We didn't add anybody.

There are staff at each of the campuses, in varying degrees

and varying sizes that can accommodate setting the

equipment up.

In some cases, they are running their

own streaming server.

In several cases, they are capturing on site, and were

hosting the enterprise system in Knoxville, and streaming

from Knoxville.

So your relationship to the expansion is in some cases

more distant, where you're providing a helping hand by

running the EX server software, by sometimes you're

dealing with the whole thing, but you get some staff

leverage by supporting others who are using.

If you had to estimate--

because so many questions are around this--

I guess I'll make it a two-part question from what

people have asked.

Have you seen good results in terms of the ability you

expand, not having to expand a lot of FTE?

Or have you had to really see whether it's they're working

for you, or they're working for departments.

Have you seen a ratio of FTEs to Mediasite deployments that

you could comment on?

Typically, we haven't seen a ratio.

We've not seen any increase.

In fact, there's been more of a repurpose than anything else

at the other campuses, where folks that were responsible

for video conferencing or are involved with distance

learning at those other campuses, are actually

handling the Mediasite set up.

We offer but do not enforce the availability of a server

and support.

And of course, we support their calls but we also

forward calls to Sonic Foundry and to our third-party

integrator that we use locally.

Got you.

So you've got a nested support.

So you haven't had to expand a lot.

Another question that actually nests into a group of

questions, but a lot of people are asking the number of

concurrent classroom recordings being done.

How many classroom lectures are you currently capturing on

a daily basis, would you estimate system-wide?

OK, that's another good question.

I showed you a couple of those rooms where we had automated.

We have entered into an agreement with the distance

education folks at the University of Tennessee on a

four-year agreement to provide a classroom that has all of

the capture equipment in it.

They're booking it solid.

When I say they're booking it solid, there's three classes,

typically three classes a day, in that one classroom.

Simultaneous, I would have to get back to that particular

here, to give an exact, but I would say anywhere between

four and five classes simultaneous, at any given day

during the week.

Any given time?

Right.

Got it.

Another question goes to captioning.

And there's a couple of people who've asked this.

But I think [? Michelle ?]

asked this best. Is the captioning

option inherent in Mediasite?

I'm thinking about compliance for disabled students.

What options are there if it's not inherent in the product?

Well, one of the options-- and I showed you an example of

that slide, [? Michelle-- ?]

we're actually using a third-party video switcher--

For the live?

For the live.

For the live captioning.

Either we do live captioning or it's after the fact.

An after the fact means they've captured the video,

someone has set down and actually done the captioning

manually, and given us the files to incorporate that into

the Mediasite.

And then Mediasite can ingest a certain type called a SAMI

file of a transcript.

So for on-demand, Mediasite has that capability.

Bob does it live and uses a broadcast technology to put

the captioning on Line 21, I think it's called?

What we found is that our viewers, the feedback we get

is that they want to see the captioning in the video.

That's why we've experimented using that because they want

to be able to view it in the same plane as the video.

Totally makes sense.

Another question is, have you compared Mediasite to some of

the content streaming options that are available from video

conferencing providers?

Try not to use any means but we all know there's two or

three of those guys.

So they're saying, can you compare in your evaluation

using Mediasite streaming services versus some of the

things that come from major video conferencing

manufacturers?

Not to put you on the spot.

Well, we looked--

a lot of those were later to the games and they came out

with their products after we had

already settled on solution.

It's a university and we're going to invest based on a

three to five year return on our investment.

We know fully well that there's going to be folks

coming out with technology and there's going to be inroads

made with video conferencing as far as content management

and content capture.

But we're conservative in the sense we're not going to

switch horses, due to those technologies.

We've looked at them but we still haven't found anything

that matches what we're able to deliver now.

And by that, I mean the ability to take the rich media

input and synchronize it with the video.

We don't do a lot of post-production work with any

of our captures.

And that's important to us.

We don't want something we have to go back in and do a

lot of manipulation.

I don't know if that directly answers it.

We evaluate them as they come along but we're pretty happy

with what we've got.

So what he was saying is, Mediasite is the best and

always has been.

Very good.

I just translate.

Another group of questions that's come in that's related

to that is, among the things that you manage your portfolio

is video conferencing, and you alluded to how you've used

them together, especially in that international example.

People would like you to expand on that.

How do you use Mediasite and video conferencing together?

Or do you not see them as related?

No, we very much see them related.

Typically, it's a bridge solution and the 300 folks

watching, 13 of them are probably back

there in the office.

So if I mess this up, they're going to tell me, I'm going to

email you and let you know the answers.

The truth is, we put a phantom Kodak into the mix.

This is a bridge solution.

We use a TANDBERG-- can I say that?

I said it--

we use a TANDBERG bridge and actually put a phantom Kodak

in and capture as a separate input to the Mediasite.

Most of the time, it's a Duo Video type solution where we

can capture the 239 signal coming in, and also stream the

slides as well as the video.

That's how we set it up.

It's always in a bridge solution

that we have captured.

Another guest asking--

she's asked you to get more specific--

but another guest asked you to briefly talk specifically

about one classroom, like maybe one of your easy type

classrooms, but what's really in it?

If you're a professor, if you don't mind diagramming it out.

One of the more advanced Smart classrooms will have your

typical projector, a podium with an input panel, or an

input for their laptop, so a VGA capture, a Sympodium

panel, which we use pretty exclusively, and I'm thinking

I may have mentioned the AMX.

And the [? Vaudio? ?]

The [? Vaudio ?]

is typically--

that's in our new generation.

That's in our new generation, what we call our easy button

classrooms. And that is AMX controls, integrated with the

[? Vaudio ?]

tracking system, typically one camera, in some situations we

have two cameras, choir mikes, which we gate electronically

when the instructor quits talking, and there's questions

from the audience.

Those mikes will gate down and those mikes will gate up so

that we can capture questions from the audience.

So that room set up functions autonomously?

It does.

Once the recording starts?

The automatic tracking camera is focusing on the instructor,

based on where they are, with that [? Vaudio ?]

system.

And then the microphones are switching between instructor

talking, student answering a question, so you're really

getting great Mediasite recordings without any FTE at

that point.

Other than starting it up.

Exactly.

Well, what we ended up doing was using the mats and a lot

of the folks out there will know what that means.

When they step on the mat, the camera tracks

right to that location.

And in other locations, we've actually use the infrared

sensing system that actually tracks the instructors as they

move around the front of the classroom, without them having

to wear a device that they walk out and forget and keep.

It does make the classroom autonomous from that

standpoint.

And Shawn, close your ears, but we did use the AMX

programming that came with the Mediasite.

But what we found is that the instructors didn't want to

spend the time to learn how to find their presentation on the

list. They wanted to be able to start their capture when

they started their lecture.

And then stop the capture when they're finished.

And that was why we call it the easy button.

But the idea was one stop, one button, pause if you need to,

and then resume.

More than you want.

It's fantastic.

There's a ton of questions coming in right now.

This is more of a technical question.

I'm going to hit you with this anyway.

He say,s I suspect you're hosting on site but are there

significant advantages with a hosted solution, perhaps by

Sonic Foundry, especially for

international distance learning?

This person is thinking of a distance learning application

that will have a lot of international end viewers, and

have you ever streamed through a CVN?

How is the streaming load on your network and have you ever

considered using an outside source, like

us, to address it?

Absolutely.

In fact, we've talked about this several times.

We're a university.

So we've got what we call big pipe coming into the

university.

But that's not to say that we don't have network issues, and

we don't have problems. It will just be better suited to

stream from a Sonic Foundry, for example.

In that case, we would call the event folks and set it up.

We have not done any work with the CVN.

In fact, that's an upcoming topic, I think,

for the users group.

So we're going to be approaching, talking about the

CVN coming up in the next month or so.

We are talking this week actually with

the distance learning.

There's a distance learning initiative between the

forestry department at University of

Tennessee and Ethiopia.

So we're looking at, when you start talking international

audiences, you talk to start talking about areas that

necessarily don't have the broadband capabilities.

We're going to look at what solutions we've got in our

arsenal to take care of that, whether means putting servers

on site, or whether it means burning CDs, or whether we

take advantage of CVNs.

All of which you can do with Mediasite.

If my memory--

which is failing the older I get--

but you used our live hosting occasionally to supplement.

Yes.

So most of my customers around the world, even if they have

built-in infrastructure, have done a hybrid.

From time to time, when they've found a particular

application, or like a commencement, like Bob was

talking about that they do so well, they might come to us

and use us to augment their streaming capability and

distribute their things.

There's a whole group of the questions that are these soft

questions, that are about how the faculty feel about.

So I'm going to read the most broadly written

one here from Marianne.

I understand the use of lecture capture.

What was your experience with regard to the level of faculty

embracing or resisting the use of this technology?

Also, how do faculty keep a high level of student

engagement in classes that use this method of instruction?

And then, she asks a third question, can you give a

general cost that a college would incur if they were going

to move in the direction of using Mediasite?

We can help her offline.

I'll start at that end first and I would refer to you all

for the cost and to talk with the SCRs on that.

As far as faculty involvement, as you might imagine any

university, especially the size of the University of

Tennessee, this it's all over the spectrum.

In some instances, classes are captured but not streamed,

either live, and they're made available, on-demand, for the

students during finals week.

That's a decision that is purely a business decision, on

the side of the academy.

Let me rephrase.

My disclaimer is that we are not educators in this

department.

We're engineers and we are delivery.

Now, we do take responsibility for finding out and getting

feedback from folks on what features they want, what

features they like, some of the feedback that they get

from their students.

We find that easy is better.

The less that a faculty member has to worry about the

technology in the classroom, the better off they are, there

material is, the better off for the students.

I'm trying to be delicate about this, Shawn, and say

that we focus on the delivery of the content.

And we do rely on another department within the IT

organization to work with faculty on how to use the

equipment, how to integrate this type of technology into

their curriculum.

That address is her question well though I think is a guide

to who's traveled around in that your system

is an opt-in system.

Your chancellors and all your bosses, and the faculty, saw

fit not to mandate, you must stream by such-and-such a

date, but you set up

infrastructure to be a service.

In your particular case, there's not the same

resistance that some might find if their Dean had said,

we're going to be streaming by next semester-- which I love

that when that happens--

that's when these folks have to deal with some resistance

strategy sometimes.

Another question that's come in, and I'm just jumping all

over the place, can you briefly talk about time saved,

cuts in costs, and increase in services specifically?

You talked about time saved in terms of the geography of

Tennessee, where it's literally a state designed to

make the drive.

And that you've been able to help people out.

Where do you think you've been able to save costs by

deploying Mediasite, or lecture captured in general?

The soft costs is, of course, be the ability for students to

go back and review on-demand.

To me, it's hard to a price on that.

There are huge cost savings in streaming meetings that allow

folks to not go to them, and stay at home, or stay at their

office and watch a Trustees, or State of the University

from the president.

I don't have any hard cost savings as far as to tell you

we've save $10,000 because people could stay home in

inclement weather, or deliver because of the pandemic issues

that have come up over the past couple years, that they

saved money by streaming these classes.

I think what we're going to see is right now, there's a

move afoot to start to expand the walls of the classroom.

And by cost savings, it's going to be making those

classrooms available, making classes available outside the

classroom so that we can extend our enrollment.

I don't see that as much a cost savings as I do as a

revenue generator in a sense.

Even better.

Even better at this point.

A lot of people asked this and I'm putting you on the spot,

but I always do for my audience.

A lot of people have asked, if you can share a URL with them

where they can see some of the recordings

that have been made.

Do you have any publicly available catalogs from the

easy button classrooms?

We do and I will post those on the presentation and make

those available for folks.

Great.

And if you included your email, we'll flip those out to

you too, if you request that, even ask a question, we'll

make sure you get any publicly available links from the

University.

That's extremely useful and nice, even though I liked the

way you captured it in your presentation.

I've never had this many questions

coming in to sort through.

Another series of questions of people asking.

This one person asked, I think in essay form nicely, when

exactly did you decide that there would be benefit to

going campus-wide and system-wide?

Was that always a part of the vision and you just started

out with one or two as a pilot in engineering services?

Or did demand grow so fast that you had to scale?

What would your recommendation be if you were starting over,

on whether to start big or small and grow?

There was no mandate--

and I use the word mandate--

we had had several requests for a couple of classes to

capture a stream on the web, and again, these are broadcast

engineers that go, well, how do we do that?

We know how video works but how do we capture

it and stream it.

We started small as a pilot, and like a lot of projects

within IT, it was a pilot project that

turned production overnight.

Because it got to where it was a critical system.

We had two boxes.

We were running out of ways.

We couldn't service everyone that wanted service.

In retrospect, I would approach it truly is a pilot.

I would actually, once the pilot was complete and all the

evaluations, and everybody was happy with what we had done

during the pilot, then I would make a full investment into

the systems and integrate them all at one time.

The problem with if you build it, they will come, is that

you can't scale quick enough.

And that was the approach that we took.

That affects you not only in ability to cover the classes,

but then things on the back end, like storage, how you're

going to accommodate storage as well.

So I'm going to take all the storage questions and combine

those up into a big snowball.

A lot of people want to know what you've come to feel is a

good amount of time to keep content up?

I'll say this in the aggregate.

People want to know do you keep a semester's worth of

recording up at a time, and then delete them?

Can you move them offline?

Do you keep everything online so it's a library?

Or does it vary?

It varies and one of the things that previously when I

worked with this group closer, it was to come up with

retention policy.

And the retention policy used to be driven from the academy,

not from IT saying, we've only got this much storage.

We're approaching it from the standpoint of here's how much

storage we have. The department used to come up

with a retention plan.

There are retention plans for course and curriculum

materials, like in our course management system, Blackboard,

which we use where they roll the content over.

Now our policy is that we will keep content for a year.

We'll notify the owners of the content that we're getting

ready to delete the content.

Would they like it preserved on a CD format, we'll export

CD, the give them the presentation.

That totally makes sense.

And that's valuable information.

That's a question that people asked in different ways, as

they try to create their retention policies.

Here's another important strategic question that people

are asking.

Do you install one recorder per room, every time, or are

you doing some sort of recorder sharing and pulling

in signals from multiple rooms and to a

master control center?

And if so, describe.

OK, we're not doing any multiple rooms per recorder.

On the rack systems that are installed, they service those

rooms. This is a point to bring out is that

it's really up to--

and to do this right, you really need to work with the

departments that are in that building geographically, so

they can affiliate their curriculum.

They can affiliate their classes that are taught in

those classrooms. In other words, maximize their

investment and come together and say we would like to make

this room the capture classrooms.

Or these three rooms.

Or these three, whatever, and commit to it.

What we have and I'm sure this is not atypical for the

University of Tennessee is that, we're going to install

this equipment and capture this one class.

So that means between those times, it's sitting dormant.

And that's not a good use.

That's not a good investment.

That's not a good use the equipment or the resources.

That's a great suggestions.

So what you're saying, if--

I'm just reflecting back--

you take the time to not just risk, even though you're doing

an opt-in model versus pushing a mandate into a facility, you

are immediately getting with all of the tenants, were

someone might go in and say, hey, this is

coming to your building.

If you want to flip your schedule and understand that

everybody who wants to opt-in to lecture capture best stack

themselves into room 101 for their fall semester schedule.

And then when that's full, you might recommend they have a

couple more rooms or whatever.

but take that moment, that pause, to use the schedule to

work for yourself, but you're still doing one recorder per

classroom and that's worked for you.

And then we use mobiles where the event is, or the class

doesn't have the capabilities, or we have something to where

we just have to go out on location.

We still only have two mobile recorders.

All right.

Take a sip because there's a bunch of questions.

We opened up a can of worms, which is

good, on audio capture.

When you said the word choir mike, we

got about 10 questions.

People want to know what, in your findings, has come to be

the best way to capture audience participation and

presenter participation, in a lecture webcast?

Well, another disclaimer is that there's folks a lot

smarter than me that know about this.

We use a variety of technologies.

One is we use an audio science mike, one of the big Plexiglas

for video conferencing typically, in a room.

That's one classroom, how we have it set up.

The choir mike solution came about because we--

Those are just like the microphones

sticking out the ceiling?

We call them choir mikes.

They're hanging on a single line.

And inexpensive?

Relatively?

Relatively inexpensive.

If people want the details of what we bought and what we put

in those classrooms, I'll be glad to put you in touch with

the person that designed that and selected the materials.

It depends on the classroom.

It really does.

If we already have existing technology we utilize it.

This question has come up.

Tough one.

If you had to guess, what is the budget per classroom for

the AV aspects of the easy button classroom?

Mikes?

That's going to vary because every university's got

different agreement contracts in place.

And there's various contracts that play into this.

And we see the costs fluctuate.

A typical Smart classroom might cost us, just typical,

anywhere between $18,000 and $20,000, is what we spend.

If we add the video conferencing piece then that's

over and above.

That's another $8,000 to $10,000 over that.

If it's going to be a video conferencing enabled room.

Exactly.

When we go in, we really lobby hard to make a room fully

functional as far as video, if we do the video conferencing,

then the capture as well, it's an easy

transition to suggest that.

I would say anywhere between on the lower end, $15,000 to

$18,000 and then on the upper end, it gets into the $30,000,

$35,000 range.

Got it.

A lot of questions to come in when you said Sympodium.

Can you explain, like one person asked, do you have a

method to capture white board use?

If so, what type of equipment, smart boards, or camera?

And other people have asked you repeat your recommendation

for annotation devices.

Same question.

We use all the above.

It is a university.

We have existing Smart technology, Sympodium.

We use the Wolf Camera systems for document cameras.

Wolf Vision?

The Wolf Vision.

There are installations of ceiling mounting.

But most of the time, they're flexible.

They're part of the podium, the part of the desk that sits

adjacent to the podium.

But the point is, is that we let the users, we've shown

users several different models and that's what they selected.

In one instance, we have a professor that doesn't prefer

to be video-ed during his presentation.

He doesn't mind the audio, but we capture the video out of

the document camera as the live video, and then we'll

capture screen caps from notes for the presentation piece,

the rich media.

Annotation-wise, Sympodium is--

the Smart Sympodiums are the preferred method.

We do have some old 3000 Smart Boards still in classrooms.

You said that does fine capturing, all those.

We haven't run into any problems with anything, as far

as capture, any of these devices work.

That was one of our criteria as well, is we needed

something that would capture a variety of existing technology

as well as new technologies.

Fantastic.

You can imagine the rest of the questions.

So we've got to touch LMS. What LMS do you use,

Blackboard?

OK.

People want to know, can Mediasite be used with

Blackboard, and the answer is--

Well absolutely.

We use it probably a little differently, of course we

would, in that we are exposing links to the presentations in

the Blackboard environment.

Now, with the advent of the new version of Mediasite, and

the ability to embed the videos, I see that a lot of

instructors are going to go to that ability to do an iFrame

type scenario.

Not just do the hyperlink inside a Blackboard, which is

what people currently do, to a single presentation or

automatically generated catalogs of like

presentations.

But you're talking about using our advanced player in such

and embedding the image in there, so

it's even more graphic.

We don't determine whether or not they expose this.

We're not integrating with Blackboard in the sense of,

hey, it's everything that gets captured is in Blackboard.

It's definitely up to the faculty to do that and before

someone asks, because I know they will, is that we are not

integrating with the, as far as the

security, ability is there.

But we've not had that requirement.

The content of the streamed is public content.

You just checked off three questions there, but bottom

line first of all, Mediasite can integrate with single sign

on, Blackboard, and all that stuff, has lots of

capabilities, but in your case, you're leaving it open.

Another question that multiple folks asked is, do you

restrict content, or not?

And do you integrate it with your active

directory or LDAP or not?

Currently we do not integrate all with our active directory.

We have both technologies.

LDAP that is our primary authorization

authentication method.

We do also have an active directory but we do not

integrate those two right now.

Fantastic.

Let's see.

Releases.

Do you have students or faculty sign a video release,

and if so, how do you store it?

Currently, no, we do not.

It worked OK for you.

You've been capturing a long time.

Well it has.

But here's the thing, is we recommend that the people that

are generating content, the faculty or whoever the entity

is, to take care, if there are releases needed, that's

handled by those folks.

We take responsibility in telling them, but we do not do

that on our end.

That totally makes sense.

This is the last question.

I thought it was a good one to end on because it's kind of a

theme that some people have. But one person said, how in

the world were you able to convince your budget office

that this kind of investment in lecture

capture is a good one?

Twenty five units, did you perform that pilot?

What is your advice to everyone out there who

believes in lecture capture, who believes in going

system-wide, who believes in going campus-wide, but they

want to bring their executives along?

What's the best way for them to convince

people of the value?

The best way is to show them.

To walk in, is pretty impressive.

We have we have deans and administrators that see it at

a conference or see it at EDUCAUSE, or see it somewhere

and come in and say, we want some of this.

Do you all do this?

Because we don't sell the words necessarily,

Mediasite, on campus.

We sell lecture capture.

And that's the service.

They come to us and go, hey, we saw this Mediasite.

Well, that's what we use.

Oh, OK.

Well, then we can do this.

Well, absolutely.

So what you're saying is the conversation is much easier

once people have been able to visualize some content.

Before that it's all theoretical.

There's so much technology, but once they've actually seen

something, if you build, they will come.

This is technology driven by the customer.

We want the customer to give us what the requirements.

What our goal is to become so agile that we can provide it

quickly and provide it at a quality that

they're used to seeing.

Great answer.

Well, I really appreciate your time.

You did a fantastic job.

There's still more questions coming in.

Bob has agreed to help us answer the questions that we

weren't able to get to in this broadcast. So thank you so

much for including your email address so we

can get back to you.

I'd again like to thank Bob for being such a fantastic

guest and sharing with us his views.

I would like to thank Mediasite Event Services for

producing this webcast. And I'd like to thank all of you

for joining us once again.

See you the next time.