The Educational Technology Shopping List for Pain-Free Lecture Capture

Hello, and welcome to our continuing series of live

webinars documenting creative uses of

Mediasite around the world.

I'm Sean Brown, Vice President of

Education for Sonic Foundry.

And today's webinar is titled The Education Technology

Shopping List for Pain-Free Lecture Capture.

Once again, we have a lot of people joining us from all

over the world.

In the interest of time, I won't name all the countries

and places, but we have almost 250 people registered from

every state in the union, every province in Canada, and

from countries all over the world.

Welcome to you all.

Before we get started, I'd like to point out the

interactive features of the Mediasite player through which

you are viewing us right now.

Below me in the lower right, you'll notice a speech bubble.

That's the ask button.

If you'd like to pose a question to me for my guest at

any time during the presentation, simply click the

speech bubble and submit your question via text and I'll

receive it.

We'll take your questions at the end of the presentation,

the prepared remarks of my guest. I encourage you to

provide your email address along with your question, that

way if we don't get to your question due to the large

number of people watching, we'll be able to follow up

with you afterwards, as my guest has so graciously agreed

with us to do.

In the lower left, there's also an info button where you

can get additional information about today's webcast. You'll

also find links to additional reference materials, including

the PowerPoint presentation that has been prepared by my

guest, under the icon that looks like "Links".

So to introduce my guest today.

Thomas Kemp is the Director of Instructional Technology and

Support at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio.

Over the last 10 years, Tom has overseen the construction

or renovation of 17 academic buildings and more than 175

classrooms. His work involves all forms of learning

management for the campus, including online synchronous

and asynchronous programs, classroom construction, design

and engineering, and audio visual services for over 210

technology teaching spaces around six campuses.

My fellow twin separated at birth and

Star Wars fan, welcome.

How are you doing?

Thank you.

Well Sean, thank you for inviting me to come to

Madison, Wisconsin and to the corporate headquarters of

Sonic Foundry, it's been--

On your wedding anniversary.

So sorry Nina, sorry.

But I had to have you.

Yeah, much to my wife's chagrin, I'm here right now.

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary.

But thank you for inviting me and I look forward to learning

more about Sonic Foundry and what you're doing here at the

corporate level and how we can prepare ourselves at Ashland

University for Sonic Foundry in the future.

Welcome to you.

Thank you.

So what I'm going to talk to you a little bit about today

is how we've gone about and done Sonic Foundry

installations and Mediasite installations, I should say,

at our campus.

And I've been involved with Sonic Foundry since roughly

about 2003, 2004, when I first saw the product utilized at a

product demo.

And I was really taken in by the features that it has.

Very quickly, as Sean said, my name's Tom Kemp, I'm the

Director of Instructional Technology and Learning

Management at Ashland University.

I've been there since 2006, and we oversee quite a bit of

different things.

Actually, I should have talked about this first. I have a

masters degree from the University of Akron in

Educational Technology.

I currently sit on the board of trustees at Our Lady of the

Elms, which is an all-girls Catholic

school in Akron, Ohio.

I recently was named to the Extron Technology Advisory

Council in 2010 and I participate quite often,

actually, in events like this, where I lecture and talk a

little bit about emerging technologies.

One of them was just recently at the E-Tech conference in

Ohio this past January, February time frame.

And I've been a member of Educause since 2001.

Ashland University, which is what I actually

came to talk about.

Ashland University currently has

roughly about 6,700 students.

We have six campuses over two different states, we have five

colleges: College of Business and Economics, College of

Education, College of Arts and Sciences, College of Nursing,

and College a Professional Development.

We're located just off of I-71 between Cleveland and

Columbus, Ohio.

Back in 2007 when I came to Ashland University, we were

very weak, I would say, on the distance learning or the

online programs side of the house.

Yet we were poised to make a very quick discovery as far as

what we wanted to do with our online learning and our online

program and distance learning technology.

And we made some decisions very quickly on.

And that was we looked at it kind of from a three tier

standpoint.

We wanted to get off of our antiquated and older web CT

software that we were using for our learning and

management suite.

And very shortly after I got there, we moved to Angel LMS.

And we also wanted to be able to make sure that we were

doing best by our students.

We wanted to make sure that the online content that we

were putting up in our learning management suite was

able to be understood and vetted and the students would

be able to follow be online content and do the assessment

piece and quizzes and all those sorts of things.

So we put in a best practices standard for online programs

called Quality Matters.

That was something that is ongoing as well at Ashland.

And lastly, we made a decision fairly early on to move from

synchronous video conferencing to a asynchronous streaming

media format.

And when we did that, we looked at a number of

different options that were available.

And Mediasite clearly was the correct winner for us.

We did a Mediasite roll out campaign to our

institution in 2007.

You can see the rich media poster here on my slide that

we presented and posted around campus, to tell people that

Mediasite was coming.

We bought our first recorder and had it purchased and

on-campus in August of 2007.

And our server went live in October of 2007.

And training pretty much started from the moment we got

our first recorder, and it's been ongoing ever since.

Let me talk a little bit about that very quickly.

We never miss an opportunity to train or talk about online

programs at Ashland University, be it whether

we're talking about Angel, Quality Matters, or Mediasite,

or our asynchronous lecture capture, being Mediasite.

We try to do this at all sorts of different times.

During learning management training we talk about it,

during our faculty college week where we talk to the

faculty about the new technologies that are coming

for that particular semester.

Any time we get a video conferencing request, we still

do video conferencing at the campus, but we try to steer

people away from it and move more towards an

asynchronous format.

And we always talk about Mediasite at

that point in time.

And certainly, we use Mediasite for graduation and

live events.

And we also tell people a lot about what we're doing with

Mediasite technology whenever we do professional development

or off-campus events.

One of the things that we also tried to do was we tried to

set it up and make it easy for our faculty and our students

to understand, essentially, the process or how to use the

technology.

Mediasite is actually fairly simple for us to use.

It was fairly simple for our faculty to grasp

what we were doing.

We literally went from a 12 step DVR recording process to

do our asynchronous online content, to a four step

Mediasite process.

And I cannot begin to tell you how much happier the faculty

were once we had this in place.

Some of the things that we did was is we set up and organized

our folders for media content, so that it was very

understandable what we were doing.

As you can see from an early folder that I pulled off of my

Dell laptop here from when we first started this, we

actually had a folder called "Heads." And in all the heads,

we actually had all the different presenters.

We made it a point to go and get pictures of all the

presenters.

We just didn't have an icon.

We always try to get the pictures of who were

presenting.

That actually lended itself into a very

large database of people.

Also you can see we made graphics that allowed our

students to understand that when you're plugging in a

Mediasite box or using a Mediasite pigtail to connect

to a classroom, here are the things you need to know.

And this particular graphic here deals with where to plug

in RCA connectors or VGA connectors into

the Mediasite box.

So we did step by step instructions for the faculty

and the students.

And we created them based on the locations and the

departments and where the rack mount or mobile Mediasite

boxes were going to be utilized.

And very quickly, here are just some examples that one of

my colleagues, Tim Lombardo, created for us.

It's a step by step instruction on essentially how

to use the box from very basic beginning of how to turn the

thing on, step one, step two, step three.

What the interface looks like, what it does,

those kinds of things.

These are all graphics that we created for our faculty and

our students in house.

So there's some pictures of that.

And then let me talk to you a little bit about how we are

utilizing Mediasite on campus.

We actually have six boxes on campus.

We have four rack mounts and two mobiles.

In some cases, we have places where the rack mount boxes are

actually servicing more than one room.

In other cases, it's a dedicated Mediasite box that's

servicing the room.

And what we tried to do was is we tried--

as much as I like to standardize classrooms, both

at my previous university, at Cleveland State University and

at Ashland University-- when I got there, there was no

standardization to the classroom.

In other words, if you talk in Schar 100, there's no

guarantee that if you went to Kettering 100 that you would

see the same technology.

So if I'm a faculty member that moves from building to

building to building, I had to re-learn the instructional

technology in that classroom every single time.

And there's no bigger way to make your faculty feel

techno-sensitive or make them feel like they're going to

fail in front of their students than to keep changing

the technology on them.

So one of the things we tried to do is we tried to

standardize the technology across the campus.

Unfortunately because of cost and because of location in

some cases, and we were adapting old video

conferencing suites to be more of a Mediasite, asynchronous

capture facility, we were not able to standardize our

Mediasite capture as much as I would have liked to.

If I could go back and do it over again, I probably would.

But we use a combination of Crestron and Extron

technology.

And I know AMX also has Mediasite technology

out there as well.

This is the Crestron control interface that they have

that's essentially a boilerplate or a template that

you can use when connecting a rack mount Sonic Foundry

Mediasite box to the system.

This system here, it kind of looks a little bit-- if you're

familiar at all with how a Sonic Foundry Mediasite

interface looks-- it looks kind of similar to this.

You can see in the middle of the a screen, the composite

video that you're capturing, you can see the recording

audio levels and things of that nature.

Plus, you're actually also able to manage the slide

presentation from this interface here, right on the

Crestron panel.

So if you have Crestron technology at your location

right now, this is something that you can get from Crestron

that's pretty much a plug-and-play.

It's just making sure that the RS-232 command code will

interface with this touch panel.

And if you look on the bottom, you'll see that there's a

"main," an "options," and more "options." So this is the

second slide.

This slide here gets a little bit more into the back-end of

the Mediasite box that's at that particular location.

Where you can see the amount of hard drive space that's

left, whether or not communication is up and

running, those kinds of things.

And then even more detail.

You can sit there and essentially assign every

presenter a number, and then when somebody goes in and uses

that facility, they can say, OK I'm presenter number 20,

put in your number, and then it automatically loads all of

your information into the Sonic Foundry Mediasite box.

You can also change widescreen aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9.

Things of that nature that are also available on this

particular panel from Crestron as well.

Again, this is something that you can just ask for from the

Crestron folks and they will provide for you.

Extron also has just gotten into business, within the last

year or so, of building touch panels.

I'm very interested in using Extron technology at our

campus because most of our classrooms are actually built

around Extron switchers.

And for us, from a small campus perspective that has

limited audio visual staff, it's very good for us to be

able to use the web buoy that we use to control and do the

programming.

So this is a mock-up that I've done that I'm hoping to

essentially be able to utilize one day on one of our rack

mount Sonic Foundry boxes.

Again, very simple.

You can start and stop the recording from this touch

panel, you can get into the some of the menus, and you can

see the instructor there in the middle of the screen.

And this uses the same template that Extron puts out

as just a standard boilerplate template that they have.

Looking at some of the classrooms where we use

Mediasite, this is in our Schar College of Education.

We have, as I said, Mediasite all over the campus.

I'm going to pay particular attention to one or two

buildings, here.

In our Schar College of Education, rooms 140, 141, we

have a two room set up where we essentially use one box to

control two rooms or do recordings in two separate

rooms that are adjoining to each other.

Again, we have a Crestron panel where the instructor

basically just touches the screen to begin.

They can see the panels start to load in front of them.

And then all the options for you to be able to use the

Mediasite functionality are right there

on the touch panel.

Be able to start and stop the recording, be able to possibly

switch cameras, and things of that nature are all available

right there on the touch panel.

There's a separate touch panel in the other room that allows

a student possibly to-- if it's more of a production kind

of solution, where we have production values in place

that we have to make sure that we administrate--

there's another touch panel in the opposite room where we can

also steer the camera manually and things of that nature, if

the situation calls for it.

And some of the other things we've done to make the room a

little bit more Mediasite compatible, we've integrated

audio microphones and those kinds of

things into the ceiling.

This microphone you see here is one commonly called a choir

microphone.

It's the exact type of microphone that you might see

in a church hanging from the ceiling to capture the choir.

Picks up very nicely, sounds very good.

So that's one of the things we done to try to essentially put

Sonic Foundry Mediasite into that location.

Certainly we are doing a lot of VGA

capture or data capture.

And so we've been using SMART Boards on

our campus for years.

I'm sure we're going to continue that partnership with

them and we're very happy with that.

And the benefits to this, obviously the

design is very simple.

It allows the students to basically go in and run the

room for the faculty.

And the faculty members are able to go in and essentially

put in their data right there in the classroom and then walk

into the next room, and hit the start button, lecture, hit

stop, and FTP that information back up to the server.

And the nice thing for us from an IT perspective is, is the

staffing that we used to require that type of location

no longer is required.

Also in that room we have, like I said, a

multitude of cameras.

And we try to put in confidence monitors in

Mediasite lecture capture locations whenever possible.

That way, you're not constantly looking over your

shoulder at the SMART Board to be able to reference what

you're looking at.

You're looking at the camera always.

And hopefully the camera is right below or right above the

material that you're talking about, the content you're

talking about on the opposite side of the room.

Now as I said, we have a number of

mobile boxes as well.

And this is this is our Ronk lecture hall, also in the

College of Education.

It seats roughly 72 people.

You can see by the picture, we have a camera in the back and

a projector monitor in the back that allows us to do our

confidence monitoring for the person who's lecturing at the

front of the room.

With this particular location, we have a place where we can

plug our mobile box into the back of the room.

Right here we actually reused an older plate in this

particular case, where we have a dedicated network

connection, the VGA capture, the composite video, analog

video, and RS-232 if we would want to use it is all right

there on that plate.

And we can plug the box in and then remove it when it's not

being utilized.

Again, we do have Crestron touch panels at that location.

You can see this particular menu shows the camera, so that

we are able to zoom the camera in and out of that

particular--

right there from the front of the room for

the Mediasite box.

This room, as you can imagine, has a lot of technology in it.

I tried to originally show all the technology by a graphic

and I failed miserably.

So what I'm doing is I'm just highlighting how we

essentially take all the technology out of the

multiplexer and then DA it through either composite, VGA,

or audio preempt distribution, and all that goes to that

plate that's in the back of the room that we

plug the box into.

But that's actually the schematic diagram for that

room right there.

I'm not sure how well you can see it or not.

I'm kind of very particular when we go to build a new

installation, when I actually can control what the room is

going to look like before the building goes up.

I'm very particular about how things look, and if I can't

put a rack mount box in place and I have to have a mobile

box put in place where I'm going to be taking the box

moving it around, I actually like to build custom plates

for those locations.

A very good place to go and do that-- and we've done that at

our football stadium.

We're actually able to stream football games using our

Mediasite technology.

And also our educational training

center has that as well.

A great place that I have discovered where you can

custom make plates to do the connections is at Liberty Wire

and Cable, and the website is right there.

If you go and register, if you go click on the "web" box

link, which is right at the top of the page on that

website, you register.

You can custom build these plates using it a WebGUI that

they have right there on the page.

It works beautifully, and I highly recommend people use

this if you want to customize any kind of plate, really, but

I'm using it obviously for my Mediasite

and my capture places.

This is a location in our seminary where I have

Mediasite as well.

At this location, we're using Extron MLC 226 IP control

boxes to essentially control the Mediasite system.

It's a little bit more basic control, and I'll get into how

we do that.

This particular room, room 103, seats 48 people.

And as I said, the rack mount Mediasite box is actually in

the podium.

And as you saw, we do have a conference monitor with a

camera in the back of the room.

Controlled, like I said, by an Extron MLC 226 IP, MediaLink

Controller.

But what we're really doing is we're using the RS-232

commands that we can run out of that control box to control

a KVM switch, to be able to switch back and forth from the

keyboard to the mouse.

And here is a little bit better graphic on how we're

doing that.

Again, we're using our classroom two or a classroom

three standard and connecting up to a multiplexer or a

switcher and then from that we're able to send through

distribution amplifiers the composite and the video and

audio signals to the Mediasite box and control the

keyboard the mouse.

So we're still only using one mouse and one

keyboard at that location.

We don't have mice and keyboards all over the place.

How are we doing on time?

Good.

OK.

And as far as equipment that I've found that really lends

itself to being able to integrate utilizing Sonic

Foundry and Mediasite technology.

I'm an Extron guy.

I like Crestron, like AMX just fine, but I'm an Extron guy.

And so because of that, I actually have gone through

their catalog and I've pulled out these-- these particular

pieces of hardware are the devices I use once I come off

of the multiplexer to split off the signal.

So if I'm splitting up composite or audio or VGA

signal, these are the distribution amplifiers and

the USB switchers that I'm using to do that.

The unique thing about this particular USB switcher--

you can see the part number there from Extron--

is it does host emulation.

And host emulation is very, very important in the sense of

especially when it comes to nursing technology or any kind

of control where you can't lose connectivity with the

computer in the podium other than the Mediasite box.

Let me see if I can explain that a little bit better, I

didn't do a very good job there.

Let's say, like in our seminary, I have a computer in

the podium and a Sonic Foundry Mediasite recorder.

If I'm switching back and forth between those two

devices, if I'm using an inexpensive KVM switch, what

happens is when I make the switch, the computer that I

switched off of actually loses USB connectivity of the

keyboard and mouse and that's not good.

Especially when you're in the medical field where you're

trying to control EKGs and you cannot have-- that

instantaneous connection is very necessary.

So what this does is this allows you to maintain and

kind of trick the computer into thinking that it's still

connected by USB when actually it's not, and you're actually

controlling the opposite device.

So this particular part number I've found

very helpful for that.

It does RS-232 control, both with Crestron and Extron and

AMX technologies.

The VGA distribution amplifier is just that.

Simple VGA and DVI distribution amplifier you can

see I have here.

The DVI one is the one I tend to go with nowadays, because

it also does digital.

And so as HDMI is quickly coming upon us, hopefully this

will allow me to make that transition and I won't have to

go back and retool a lot of technology.

And then, lastly, you can see I have a part number here for

a composite audio and video distribution amplifier.

As we look to what we've done with Mediasite technology and

what's allowed our online program to expand, I certainly

point to Mediasite in saying, you know what?

We've done good, we've done very good by Mediasite in

allowing our online program to continue

to evolve and succeed.

Here are some of the hits that we've had from 2007 when our

Mediasite server first went live from a viewer standpoint.

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome are all

represented here.

There's a big chunk that's unknown, and those are people

who are still trying to connect to our Mediasite

streaming server with Windows IE 7 or old Firefox versions

that don't actually register what version it is.

But you can see we've had 41,000 hits of somebody from

the unknown.

We've also had 43,000 plus hits of Internet Explorer.

19,000 hits of Firefox.

Safari is at 3,000 and Chrome is actually starting to gain a

lot of steam.

We're up at almost 3,000 hits in Chrome and that number

seems to be doubling now every six months.

When we look at the number of hits by college, who would

have ever thought our seminary is actually the ones that have

had the most online programs that have used Mediasite as

far as the streaming capabilities, the on-time

on-demand streaming capabilities.

Over 27,000 hits on our Ashland Theological Seminary

online programs, followed up quickly by our College of

Education and then our College of Business and Economics.

Those are our big three.

And then actually, number four is our football program.

A lot of people are watching statements from our Coach

Owens our football program as well on Mediasite.

When we look at the very big picture again, what has

learning management done for us as a campus?

You can see back in spring of '06, we had roughly 87 classes

that were online.

This past fall we were at 806 online classes.

Now that does include both classroom, hybrid, and online.

So that's those three.

But I can tell you our hybrid and our online piece alone is

almost a third of all that we're doing as far as learning

management altogether.

And actually we're taking all of our online content that

we're creating with Mediasite and putting it in our learning

management suite.

Which is which one?

Which is Angel.

We are currently using Angel, we're an Angel school.

What's next for Ashland and Mediasite?

Well right now we're in the process of breaking ground on

a new college of nursing, it's going to be a very beautiful

new building for us.

Groundbreaking is planned in summer of 2011, this year.

It's going to have nine state of the art instructional

technology classrooms. All of them will be able to be used

as recording locations for Mediasite content.

Seven state of the art high fidelity simulation lamps will

also be at this location, and we will also have three state

of the art debriefing locations in this new college

of nursing, so that when the nursing students have gone and

used the Laritol or the high fidelity, or 3G simulation

mannequins, you'll actually be able to go back and watch how

they did in these particular locations.

And we're going to be utilizing Mediasite to

supplement some of that as a piece in the

background so to speak.

If I had to sit there and take Sean to task or take my

colleagues here at Sonic Foundry to task for one thing,

it's that back in the day when I first started with Sonic

Foundry, we looked at Mediasite and lecture capture

very much as a very specific location-driven thing, where

we have a room that we set up with cameras and all these

kinds of things.

And one thing has changed over the last 10 years, and that is

that in instruction now, it's not just instructor-based.

It's student-based as well.

In other words, my hybrid and my online faculty want to be

able to get information or content back from the students

and share it in an online format with other students.

Now how do you do that if you don't have a piece of software

that can handle that?

So my hope is as Sonic Foundry moves forward, that they will

come up with a software a piece of hardware that we can

hand to the students that allows for any time, any

location, by anyone kind of scenario.

So that my students also can seemlessly, using the

administrative back-end that Mediasite server EX has, they

can seemlessly post back through the system.

And I'm really hoping that with the partnership with

Camtasia, that those kinds of things will be possible here

in the very near future.

And it's very important to be able to see the student and

the data and hear them, obviously, at the same time.

We get a lot of information by body language and non-verbals.

And so it's not good enough just to hear

the student's voice.

You have to see all three, or hear all three.

Returns on investment for us.

Highly integrated with our LMS. We had it built into a

number of locations on campus.

Our IT staff is no longer required to be in the

classroom to monitor the recording.

Last semester we had zero technical problems with

Mediasite, which is beautiful for us from an IT perspective.

And we have pretty much completely replaced our

synchronous video conferencing distance learning capabilities

that at than an eighth of the cost per year.

One of the cool little Mediasite stories I can tell

you was back, about two years ago, we sponsored President

Bush when he was still the President, to come and speak

to a group of our students.

It's an on-campus political group called the Ashbrook

Center, which is a public affairs group at Ashland

University.

And regardless of your politics or how you feel

politically, it's always a thrill.

And I've been in the room both with President Bill Clinton

and with President George Bush.

It's always a thrill to see the president and be in the

same room with that individual.

And the neat stories that I could tell you-- which

unfortunately we don't have time for--

where I arrived a week in advance and met with the

Secret Service.

And we went through the technology, had Sonic Foundry

send a representative that was there, and it was an excellent

process to learn what goes on there at that

governmental level.

You can make news here, you've got some big scoop.

Well.

No.

But the process of learning how to be, I think, the first

group to stream a sitting

president, was kind of exciting.

So that was something that we did with President Bush.

When we look at applications hopefully for the future,

certainly we're going to continue to do more and more

lecture capture.

Our numbers--

I think right now we are at 4,600 or 4,800 pieces of

content that have been created specifically for our learning

management suite for students to watch using the Mediasite

and Sonic Foundry.

We continue to use our classrooms to record both

students and faculty in lecture.

We have done some athletic streaming with the Mediasite

in the past. We use Mediasite, we're looking at using it for

rehearsal space.

Certainly our family counseling and observation

locations could use something like this to be able to sit

there and watch and critique people that are going through

family counseling certification.

As I said earlier, medical simulation is very important

to us at Ashland University right now.

And we're garnering a lot of information from best

practices from Sonic Foundry on that.

And we continue to stream things like live

administrative speeches from our

president, President Finks.

And I'm hoping that soon we'll be able to do

all that from home.

Maybe we don't have to do the live streaming, but certainly

do the asynchronous capture at home.

That would be something that we'd love to do.

So very quickly, a little shout out to all the guys that

were behind the scenes that helped me put this together.

Aaron Hustis, Stephen Kaufman, Phil Leiter, Ray Lapretti, Tim

Lombardo, Bob Ring, and David Tegmire.

And now I'm here and available for any questions that you may

have.

And there are questions, indeed.

But good job on your prepared remarks.

It's provoked a lot of thought.

I'm going to start with the last one, because you

mentioned President Finks, is that his name?

Yes, President Finks.

How does the president feel about your

webcasting on campus?

As an executive, is he aware of it?

Yes, very much so.

In fact he will check with me or who's ever running the live

stream at that point.

My group is a group called the Instructional Technology

Support Group and the ITSG folks under me will sit there

and set those up, usually a day in advance, test the

links, make sure they're working.

And so he will check with us prior to him going live and

speaking to the local campus and virtual campus as well.

And that's a lot of the questions that have come in,

just pulling them together, are about how your leadership

feels about it.

Well and let me also add this.

We used to do video conferencing.

We used to have these four, five, and six way video

conferencing sessions set up.

And it was so tedious.

And getting everybody--

we would sometimes have to send IT people out to the

off-campus locations or our branch campus locations to be

able to make sure that 12 people could sit there and

watch the president's remarks.

It just got to be so tedious, it wasn't even funny.

And one of the things that my vice president, Curtis White,

said to me was, we have to come up

with a better solution.

And we had used this at Cleveland State University,

where I had come from.

And I said to myself, you know what?

I know just the thing.

And since we installed this and went with it the first

time, I mean there was never a guy who was sweating more or

biting his nails more than me that particular day, that

first time that we used it.

And we've never had a drop out,

we've never had a problem.

Once we got the networking set up and the streaming

technology set up to essentially go from the box to

the streaming server and out to the world, no issues.

Well that's good.

That's how we like it to be.

That's how we designed it to be.

One question comes in from my friend Kristen out West.

"We're a large community college district in California

with little to no budget." Have you heard that before?

I have heard that before.

This is why none of my Mediasite rooms are

standardized.

I have to sit there and especially use existing

technology and kind of implement them.

MacGuyver it together.

Yes, very much.

"What would you do if you were to start out with lecture

capture on campus with Extron controllers like yours?

How many appliances, what kind of budget, how long with your

learning curve?" Great question, Kristen.

That is a very good question.

Well, let me see if I can hit that in a

couple different ways.

To answer the question, the Extron technology, not knowing

the components that you're using, Extron technology, we

use the MLC--

I might be wrong on this-- but MLC 304s and 406 multiplexers

or switchers.

They have both composite and VGA on them.

They just came out and I'm not going to know--

the Extron guys, which I'm sure are watching, are going

to smack me on the back of the head, but I don't remember the

model number exactly.

But it's called a 409.

A 409 just came out that has both VGA, DVI, and HDMI along

with audio.

And that is the standard which we are moving forward with.

Actually, as of right now.

To be the heart of a room.

To be the heart of the room.

All the sources go into that.

Right.

And then it goes to the Mediasite.

Right.

Then what happens is through a series of distribution

amplifiers--

which you'll be able to go back and look here after the

presentation is --

using those distribution amplifiers to break the signal

out, you're able to essentially take that

Mediasite signal either in a mobile box--

which is more often what we do-- or on a rack mount

application, you're able to sit there and take that

information and be able to stream it out to

the rest of the world.

But the Extron technology for us has been bulletproof.

And their hardware is bulletproof.

And the support group that they have is

also incredibly excellent.

Continuing on the technical vein, because there's just

been an explosion of these types of questions, another

person asks--

you talked about how you have confidence monitors--

one person asked, what is the size or, in your mind, the

ideal size of the monitor for a professor to be able to look

at the students and at the camera and not have to keep

looking over their shoulder.

What's the ideal size in your view?

It depends on the size of the room, is my answer back.

So if the room is less than 20 feet deep, you probably can

get away with, say, a 40 or 42 inch LCD monitor.

As that room, then, widens up or the number of desk are in

between that location and the faculty member, certainly if

the room is narrow and long, that monitor size

needs to get bigger.

I try to standardize everything nowadays.

We have 37s, we have 42s, but anymore I try to standardize

on an LED that is 55 inches.

So I've tried to standardize on the monitor size.

We kind of bounced around on monitor sizes initially, but

now we've standardized pretty much on a 55.

Because a 55 LED is so sharp and so clear.

And they're coming down.

I mean, they're not free for goodness sake, but they've

certainly come down when you get to that kind of size, for

this kind of application, which is great.

And it really makes your faculty much more comfortable.

Oh, so much more comfortable.

Because they're not stuck behind the podium.

They can move around.

And if you employ a USB clicker to just click through

the PowerPoint and you widen up the angle on the camera a

little bit, now they're able to roam around and talk to

students and look around, and it's a much more natural

environment.

And that's really what you want.

Doing lecture capture in an empty room, not quite as good

as doing lecture capture in a room full of people.

And sometimes there's a little more time that's taken there

because you have to weed through questions

and stuff like that.

But if the instructor knows that they're doing a lecture

capture and says, just hold all your questions until the

end, gets through the lecture and then gets feedback.

There's still a lot of positive things that you're

able to garner by getting non-verbal communication from

the students.

And just, in general, the lectures in general are

actually better in front of people.

Now just holding you on that thought-- you're on a good

thought process relative to the faculty, so

keep that hat on.

You mentioned specifically, and a couple people have asked

questions about it, your scheme for assigning a number

to a faculty member in your workflow, that they type into

the Crestron or the AMX system.

Can you get into that a little more?

Or is it just really confusing?

Well I could explain it, but I would be doing it out of

theory, because I have not yet put it in practice myself.

We don't have enough Crestrons that do that.

It involves essentially assigning a faculty member to

a database with a picture and all those kinds of things.

But it's for ad hoc recording?

Is it so that I don't have to schedule in advance?

Yeah, so you come in, you sit there and you go to the

Crestron panel.

You say, OK I'm instructor number 20.

I'm going to hit that button.

And it's going to know who I am--

And then deposit it where it needs to be.

And then deposit it into a folder.

Got it.

I totally get that.

That's smart, to reduce it to a number.

But different universities, the Mediasite system has a

great way of scheduling in advance a presentation.

But a lot of times in a controlled and automated

environment, you want to be able to push a Mediasite

presentation out that you may not have planned to do before.

And the scheme that Tom has come up with would be a very

good one to walk in and just identify

yourself to the system--

And I can't take credit for it.

Actually Crestron came up with it.

I'm just trying to relay it.

Those guys, they'll be fair.

They steal all your ideas anyway.

Crestron guys are pretty smart.

That's fantastic.

Jason asked a question about whiteboards, so keep thinking

about the classroom and faculty.

He says, do you have any traditional whiteboards that

are used in a classroom?

And if so, how do you ensure that the content written on

these old-fashioned boards is captured on the recording?

And is it legible?

So how do you handle that problem, or is it not a

problem at your school where you've ripped them all out and

gone SMART Board?

We've gone SMART Board.

In fact, our College of Education, unfortunately or

fortunately, every room has a SMART Board.

If I had to do it over again or had to do it differently, I

would have made sure that SMART Boards that we had in

our College of Education were of the 16:10 aspect ratio or

the 1280:800 aspect ratio.

Because you're actually able to capture lots of information

just by virtue of the instructor sitting there

writing on the board and essentially using it like a

dry erase board.

The version that we have in there right from SMART-- not

that there's anything wrong with it, but I think it's a 77

inch, but I might be wrong on that.

But it's a 4:3.

It's a 4:3, it's an old monitor style.

And with everything going 16:10 from a business

standpoint or 1920x1080 or 1280x800 resolution, I wish

that we had done that.

I will tell you that we've gone and done that and put in

16:10, we started using 16:10 SMART Boards

almost three years ago.

But unfortunately, when our College of Ed was built in

2005, it was still just a little too new.

Little too new.

OK, I'm going to rapid fire-- oh, go ahead.

No, I was just going to say, from a dry erase standpoint of

an old traditional white board, they make appliances

that actually use a magnet that you can put on--

Like Mimio.

Yeah, like Mimio, exactly.

That's who I was thinking of, actually.

Where you can go and you can do a USB garner and gather

that data as well.

We're always talking about SMART Boards

and dry erase words.

I didn't have an example, but we use our VGA document

cameras a lot also.

You had it in your sources.

But totally a great way to say, write on this

instead of the board.

Any VGA source.

People think that it's automatically a SMART board or

a computer.

It doesn't need to be.

Any VGA source can be captured with Mediasite.

It's how fluid the motion can be, sometimes

will trip you up.

If it's a static VGA image, all the better.

Sometimes more the motion stuff, the JPEG capture, gets

a little rough.

But it's still all good.

It's fast enough that it'll work.

Gotcha.

Now I'm going to continue in this technical vein.

You did a great job because you're getting both business

questions and technical questions both.

So let me just finish a few more of these tech

questions for you.

One pedagogical question is, can you talk more about

lecture capture?

Andy asks, can you talk more about lecture capture and

fully online classes?

How many fully online classes use Mediasite recorded

lectures as an integral part of the class?

Are lectures typically required for students?

Are the recorded lectures typically recorded in a live

classroom, like you said, or in a studio?

Is lecture material made available to fully online

students in other formats, i.e.

text, PowerPoint, et cetera?

So fully online classes, are they being

done or not at Ashland?

Let me see if I can hit all those questions.

Those are very good, excellent questions, Andy.

OK, so at Ashland University right now between hybrid and

online, we have roughly about 225 classes that are utilizing

our learning management suite and some variation of that.

Of those, the online classes, I would say probably at least

half of the faculty have gone in and done some sort of

Mediasite recording.

Even if it's just going in and saying, hi my name is Tom Kemp

and I'm the director of Instructional Technology and

Support here that Ashland University.

You're going to be taking my networking and security class

from me this year.

Thanks for joining me, here's my background, here's a

picture of my kid, here's a picture of my house, I grew up

here, I graduated from there.

Glad to know you, look forward to seeing you soon.

And being done with it.

Even if they're just doing an introduction.

Bonus, excellent.

It draws the student, it brings them closer to the

faculty member that way.

And that can't be anything but helpful.

But quite honestly, most of our faculty have gone well

beyond that.

They're doing every single chapter, or every other

chapter or module or whatever is essentially being captured

using Mediasite.

I'd say probably better than half are using it as an

integral part of their online learning process.

Perfect.

I'm going to compress these because

we're in our last minute.

Rapid fire, here we go.

Some of the business questions.

How many AV staff do you have to support your Mediasite

efforts now?

Two.

Great.

This is like Jeopardy.

But that's not all they do.

So I have to qualify that.

That's good.

So that's good and [UNINTELLIGIBLE].

And that's reduced overall from what you originally

thought it would have to be?

Oh, yeah.

OK.

People asked about video conferencing.

You claimed that Mediasite in this style is an eighth of the

cost of synchronous video.

Can you elaborate on that?

If you take the cost of a Polycom or a Tandberg Kodak

plus the management software, be it the hardware, software

that is used to manage all those different connection

points, the manpower and the labor that has to be dedicated

to making it work and work well, the amount of hardware

that has to be in the classroom to support the Kodak

and those kinds of things, you take all that and apply it to

what it costs- and bear in mind, in video conferencing,

you're only able service those 24 students that are sitting

in that class at that time.

So it's only that many heads.

Right, it's only that many heads.

Whereas when you're using a Sonic Foundry or a Mediasite

application, you're able to sit there and use that same

technology dollar budget over and over and over and over and

over again.

So the amount of hardware greatly lessened the amount of

manpower and staff, greatly lessened--

and quite honestly, I can definitely say that from a

video standpoint, we would not have gone as far as we have

with our learning management and our M line programs

without Sonic Foundry and having the Mediasite

implementation.

Awesome.

A lot of people asked this question in different ways.

But is the ROI, the return on investment from all of the

gear that you put into-- because these are highly

integrated classrooms--

does it pay off in training for the professor being less,

or where does it pay off?

When you look at the technology hardware, I think

that the pay off is actually in the ability to be able to

reuse the hardware over and over and over again.

One hour you're capturing a nursing class, the next minute

you're capturing a health and ethics class, the next one

you're doing your MBA online programming.

It's the same room, you're just--

our educational technology center, our ETC room in the

technology building at Ashland University, that room gets

pummeled with usage because of the amount of people that are

scheduled to go in and do their

Mediasite lecture captures.

That's the room that most faculty we will come in and

essentially do their lecture capture because we have it set

up to do that all the time.

There are other rooms that do it, but that one is the one

that gets used the most. We have just milked that room for

all it's worth as far as hardware goes.

Got it.

This is, I think, my final question.

Joe said, you had mentioned if I can't have an RL

it'll have to an ML.

We're trying to choose between a mobile Mediasite and a rack

mount Mediasite.

Is it better to have a Mediasite built in, and why?

I like, personally--

this goes back to the old broadcasting days--

I like having technology that's built into a rack

that's been customized for that particular location.

Because the failure rate will go down.

Now certainly if you have a room that's built with a rack

mount place for you to plug in and you're taking your mobile

box in and putting in place, and then you're able to take

it to another building where you have another plate where

you're able to plug in.

That's good.

But if you're not going to do that, if you don't get to that

standardized level, then you definitely just want to do a

single rack mount at a single location.

And then maybe sit there and use a switcher to do multiple

rooms in that building.

That would be probably the solution I would point

somebody to without knowing what exactly

you're trying to do.

And I lied.

I'd be remiss if I didn't ask the final question.

Here we go.

Everyone is asking about budget.

Centralized budget for these rooms, ad hoc budget per

classroom, you did the campaign with the poster that

some people commented sounded great.

How did, and do you continue to get the

budget for these rooms?

And from whom?

Well, the my budget comes from IT.

Central.

Centrally.

From our IT budget.

The rooms you control, this is what--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

It comes out of our audio visual services technology

budget, Mediasite does.

Now that being said, where does that money come from, how

does that money gets blessed?

Well, it ultimately comes from the vice president of IT and

from the provost because it's an academic function.

Our provost has been incredibly considerate and

kind when it comes to being able to fund and support our

online programs at an institutional level.

So long as I can sit there and show the graphs and the pie

charts, and show the--

every single time I think that we're going to

plateau and get on top--

Which you get on Mediasite, right?

What's that?

The reporting?

Yeah.

That's OK.

The EX server software will sit there and give

me all of that data.

And so being able to sit there and show that two or three

times a year when I meet with the provost, with the vice

president of IT, and hey, we continue to improve, and look

what we're doing, and we can't let this fail, we have to keep

moving forward.

That's how I do it.

We let the data and the results speak for themselves.

Well how lucky your faculty are, and your students, to

have you leading the charge.

For using all the

technologies, not just Mediasite.

Thank you for your questions.

We didn't get to all of your questions, but Tom has been so

gracious to agree--

and almost everybody provided their email address--

we'll address those questions that we didn't get to offline.

I'd like to thank Sonic Foundry Event Services for

producing another great webcast. I thank my guest for

coming all the way up to Ohio and thank Nina and Tally for

sharing him on this important day.

And I'd like to thank all of you for joining us.

We'll see the next time.