Getting the Buy-In and Budget to Launch Hybrid Courses Right Now

Hello, and welcome to our continuing series of live

webinars documenting creative use of

Mediasite around the world.

I'm Sean Brown, vice president of

education for Sonic Foundry.

And today's webinar is entitled Getting the Buy-In

and Budget to Launch Hybrid Courses Right Now.

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

over the world.

We have about 150 online at the time of going to air.

We have universities and corporations and government

agencies from all 50 United States represented and all

provinces in Canada--

I always like when that happens--

and from many countries around the world

too numerous to mention.

But I'd like to welcome first-time institutions

joining us from Ireland and from Puerto Rico.

Welcome to all of you.

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

interactive features of the Mediasite player that you're

utilizing today, in case you want to ask a question during

the presentation.

For our advanced Silverlight player-- the one with the

black background--

you allow your mouse to hover below the video window, where

you'll notice a horizontal control bar will appear.

In the classic player--

with more of a white background--

there are persistent icons above the video where I'm

currently situated.

In either player, you'll see a speech bubble like a speech

bubble from a comic book.

Use this button if you'd like to pose a question to me at

any time during the presentation.

And at the end of it, I'll relay the questions that I

receive here, via Mediasite, to my guest today.

Also, in the classic player with white background, you'll

notice a links icon.

And in the advanced Silverlight player with the

black background, you'll notice an information icon.

Behind both of these icons, you will find supplementary

information about this presentation, including the

slides that my guest will be using, which he's been so

gracious to allow us to share with you.

So now I'd like to introduce my guest. Russell Beard is

known to me as the best bass player west of the

Mississippi.

But to most of the rest of the people in the world, he's

known as the director of information and communication

services at Big Bend Community College.

He has served in this capacity at the college

for over nine years.

Big Bend Community College has worked to be an innovator in

distance education for over 20 years, having one of the

largest service districts in the state of Washington.

Russell has served on numerous state commissions and councils

providing a vision for technology and its use in the

classroom, not only for Big Bend Community College but for

all of the community and technical

colleges in the state.

Pleasure to have you here with us in Madison, Russell.

Thank you.

Your prepared remarks.

Thank you.

I want to get started by telling you a little

bit about Big Bend.

And I think it'll give you some insight into why hybrid

classes are so important to us.

The picture in the slide shows you a snapshot of our service

district, which is approximately 4,500 square

miles, right in the heart of the high desert of Washington.

We are one of the smallest schools in the state and serve

a really vast area--

a lot of rural communities.

Some of our students drive 80 miles one way

to come to the college.

So having a robust distance learning environment--

and even more important, hybrid learning environment--

has been really crucial to their success as students.

Over the course of the last couple years, as with most

states, we've received some opportunities through budget

crises across the state of Washington that have really

forced us to look at everything we do and come up

with innovative ways to do it better.

This is a little snapshot of the demographics of Big Bend.

Our district has about a 102,000 people in it across

those 4,500 square miles.

I'm not going to read this to you, but as Sean said, the

slides are included, and this gives you an idea or a

snapshot of what our student population looks like.

I want to talk very briefly about the budget situation

that we've been dealing with.

As you can see from the slide, it's kind of

going the wrong way.

The last bar chart on the bottom is our projected budget

for the 2010-2011 fiscal year.

So we've really had to evaluate everything we do.

We have a rich history of video conferencing for

classrooms across our district.

We had, at one time, seven sites across our district and

invested millions of dollars in those different sites to

bring education to the outer areas of our district.

All along through this, we've had executive buy off on our

distance programs and using Mediasite is no exception.

And I wanted to mention that right up front because as most

IT folks out there understand, getting that executive buy off

is one of the key indicators to your success.

Without it, you're probably not going to be as successful.

Just a brief background of what we did with video

conferencing.

We had a full-blown conferencing bridge, invested

$70 to $85,000 in every broadcast classroom on campus,

and then invested $60,000, roughly, in each receiving

site in our district.

Costly annual maintenance agreements, a lot of staff

time to keep it running, and any time you had issues with

your link between classrooms, you lost that classroom.

And that's, essentially, what brought us the opportunity of

seeing Mediasite.

We initially purchased a starter package just for

backup purposes.

And when we started hitting these budget crises, we

started looking at the money invested and the return on the

FTE, and we decided it was time to

do something different.

And so over the last year, year and a half, we've been

phasing out video conferencing.

And as of spring quarter last year, we don't do any video

conferencing classrooms. And everything

is done over Mediasite.

And you can see, from this slide, this is approximately

what we invest. We invest $65,000 in a broadcast

classroom and then there's virtually no cost for the

receiving sites.

There's a caveat to that, that we have a number of

communities that barely have access to dial-up, and in

those communities, we are putting in what we call

community knowledge centers, where a community member or

one of our students can come in, basically, in a small lab

and take a class from Big Bend.

The other thing that we're extremely proud of is the

design plan that we've come up with.

And I'm going to talk about that in a little more depth

later, but the faculty on our campus have driven the design

of our Mediasite classrooms. And that is really, really key

to the success of what we're doing.

Some of the reasons we really like Mediasite is there's no

post production, which, you reap benefits in the staff

time that it saves.

The streaming capabilities have exponentially increased

our outreach to students.

And our biggest vehicle for getting these Mediasite

classrooms up and running in midst of all these budget

situations has been our ability to write grants.

We've had two or three different grants over the last

two years that have helped fund the five Mediasite

classrooms we currently have on campus.

This is just a couple of snapshots

of our latest design.

And I want to go into some real detail about how we've

worked with faculty, because that was probably our biggest

mistake in the video conferencing classrooms. We

came up with an idea, we outfitted a classroom, and put

them in there.

And I came up with a small vision of what I call the best

of breed approach, where we have the ANGEL Learning system

as our virtual classroom, Elluminate is the virtual

faculty members' office, and Mediasite captures all the

rich lecture and makes it available to our students.

And combined, they do meet most of the needs.

What's been interesting, when we talk about how our faculty

use it, is how creative they are in finding

different uses for it.

To just say that we use it for online and hybrid is really

understating what they've done with it.

We had two faculty members that really embraced Mediasite

and its use.

And that has really driven us to work with other faculty.

I just cannot stress enough how much input they've had to

the process and therefore, there they are the reason

we've been successful with it.

When it came to designing the classrooms from the very

start, we sat down with faculty and asked them, what

do you want to do in there?

And I have a driving force when I work with technology

that I call it being transparent.

The basics of that is, most faculty members, when they

walk into a classroom, aren't worried about whether the

light switch is going to work or not.

They don't even think about it.

They just come and in turn on the lights.

And my vision is for technology to

work the same way.

I don't think they should have to come in and test their

PowerPoint and test their slides and everything that

they generally do with technology.

And that's what we've been striving for in these

classrooms. And the last three classrooms that we deployed, I

really believe we're there.

The faculty member can come into that classroom, teach his

class, and not worry about whether or not technology is

going to work.

We've made the controls as simple as we possibly can.

We're using Crestron systems to change

sources, set camera presets.

And we don't have a control person in the room.

The faculty member is running the room.

And every time we get ready to do a new classroom, we sit

down with a group of faculty that are going to use it and

say, what should we change about it?

How should we make it better?

And it has really, really driven adoption of these

classrooms. We have faculty all across the board-- whether

they've been there for 20 years or two months-- they're

using these classrooms. And it crosses many,

many different divisions.

We have math, science folks using them, social science

folks using them, medical assistant

instructors using them.

It's all across the board and they use them in many

different ways.

The critical input from the faculty has been the biggest

reason we've been successful with these.

We've seen numbers from 3% of our faculty using the video

classrooms up to 30% of our faculty using the Mediasite

classrooms. And were really just in our first year of

really diving into this.

So I just really can't stress enough about getting the

faculty involved and getting their buy-in in how you

approach this.

I wanted to talk very briefly about some things that we're

doing right now to assist our faculty.

One of the grants we wrote enabled us to write two pieces

of curriculum.

One is for students--

that we're going to encourage them to take before they take

an online class--

that teaches them how to use the tools and the technology

that we make available to our students at Big Bend.

The second piece of curriculum, it's specifically

for faculty and how to use the technology in the classroom.

And this curriculum is being written by our faculty, for

our faculty, and they will be the ones

delivering it to them.

It, I believe, will take us another step down that road of

success to delivering these courses to our students.

We're also really taking a hard look of how effective

this technology is in teaching our students.

I'm not buying into the idea because your enrollments are

up, you are successful.

I'm working with our institutional research folks

to look at how effective it is in making that great a little

bit better and how successful they are in a class that

follows up after they've taken an online class.

And that's really critical for me, as a person thinking about

technology bringing these tools to faculty, it has to be

successful for our students as well.

That's why we're here.

I wanted to just touch on a number of the other things

that we do.

We use Mediasite for so many different things.

Our state of the college address, every board of

trustees meeting, is streamed live over Mediasite.

And even, we have a business development group that

streaming classes on how to build your own

still and make vodka.

So it's all over the place.

We're using it for everything.

And it's just an exciting process to be involved in.

I want to open it up for questions.

This is the part that I really enjoy.

Well I'm glad you said that.

Now, they have questions coming in.

The first thing that you're extremely famous for doing and

that you talked about in your remarks is

getting the faculty buy-in.

And a lot of questions people ask, even before you start

talking, when they see that a big program is gone, are, what

type of faculty resistance did you find in the beginning of

rolling out this program?

The biggest resistance that we ran into was the reputation

that we had developed over the years with what we called our

ITV classes.

Those were our video conferencing classrooms. And

it took quite a bit of time to overcome the bad reputation.

As they say, bad news travels very fast and good news kind

of crawls along.

And really, the process was in building those relationships

again-- sitting down with faculty in their office or at

the lunch cafeteria or something, and just talking

about it and making sure that they felt like they were part

of the process and not making it lip service.

They need to be part of the process.

It's been 12 years since I've been in the classroom and I

don't pretend to know how technology works in there.

And getting them to really get involved in it and put the

past in the past and start moving forward has been the

biggest key to the success.

You said the word ITV and that spawned a little flurry here.

Did faculty just stop using video conferencing systems,

and the lack of use of video conferencing systems drove the

switch to Mediasite?

Or were they more vocal?

Was there a formal group giving you the feedback?

I think it's all over the map.

We do have a technology advisory committee.

They were involved in the decision to, essentially, pull

the plug on ITV. Honestly, that was probably driven more

by the budget situation than it was anything else.

So continued, ongoing maintenance or expansion?

All of that.

And there was a lot of staff involved.

We had technicians in the classroom in the remote sites.

We had technicians in the classroom on the campus.

And we don't do that with Mediasite.

We don't have a control person in the classroom with the

faculty member.

So it really was a budget thing.

All of the discussion at that time-- and this took place

about a year and a half ago-- but that was around how much

money we were spending.

And we estimated we were spending approximately

$180,000 a year to bring in six to nine FTE.

And when you compare that with what we were doing in other

programs, it just wasn't feasible.

To support how many ITV classrooms?

You said it, but in the previous model?

It was averaged at five classrooms in

the distance sites.

We had three on campus and five out in

the distance areas.

Got you.

Which is quite common in the United States, at least for

sure, and in Canada too, at least, that I that I see,

where I travel the most, to have that kind of spoke and

hub type system.

And so you're actively using those two-way interactive

video conferencing systems. But to support that and make

it successful, you had to have someone in the room to help?

Yup.

On each end.

On each end.

And that was critical.

You could tell, if one of the people that was supposed to be

in the room didn't show up, you got phone calls right

away, just because they were cumbersome, even to do to just

source switching-- switching from the document camera to

the DVD player-- those kind of things.

It wasn't designed in such a way that it was self

sufficient, as we like to call it.

The other thing that I didn't mention when I was going

through my slides, but one of the really big things is when

you're doing ITV classrooms, you get to broadcast

one class at a time.

And it's totally driven by the number broadcast classrooms

you have on your campus.

We had three, so essentially, there were never more than

three classes that could--

You had a maximum capacity.

That's what's online.

That was it-- of three classes at any given moment.

Now we have five Mediasite classrooms. And so at any

given time, there can be five classes and that distance site

could have five students taking five different classes

at any given time.

Got it.

So when you really look at it that way, it breaks it up into

more permutations as to how--

OK.

And that's where I'm talking about exponential growth.

You've thrown the chains off because that distance site was

tied to that broadcast room and it could only bring--

whether you had two students or 10 there-- they got one

class at any given time.

Exponential--

I should've understood that.

They said there were no math in this broadcast. All right.

Another question from an instructional researcher is,

what kind of student feedback have you heard

on the hybrid courses?

Do students, in your opinion, feel that the hybrid classes

are benefiting them and reaching

their educational goals?

So I know you're going to have some surveys coming up, but do

you have a gut or an early instinct?

I definitely have a gut instinct.

I'll use one example--

and I'm hesitating to use it because I just got done saying

that I don't measure success by enrollment--

but let's take, for example, a botany class.

All the lecture is done over Mediasite, and the lab, they

come onto campus for.

And traditionally, physics was another one we struggled with.

Getting the enrollment above 10--

which is our minimum class size before we have to call it

quits on that class--

getting that enrollment above 10 for classes that were

special like that was sometimes very difficult.

But when you can offer the opportunity for a student to

be able to see the lectures from their work or their home

and then only come to campus one or two days a week, we've

seen our enrollments almost double as a result of that.

Now, the effectiveness is something we still need to

measure, but the feedback from students over the last year,

just across the board, the ability to go back in and

review lectures that they saw-- maybe they have some

questions-- they have a final coming up or a midterm coming

up and they have the ability to go review something fresh--

the feedback has been huge.

That's a really, really important component to them.

A couple of questions--

I'm sorry to jump around, but there's just so many questions

that I'm trying to process--

a friend of mine from Florida asked it best. What sources

provided the grant funding for this project?

You said there was a grant, that you got outside sources.

Are you willing to share?

Absolutely One of them was a Washington state grant.

Internal state grant.

Internal state grant.

What was the drive of that grant?

What's the--

It was for creative uses of technology.

And that's almost all of them are driven around that.

Almost every state, province and national government has

some sort of creative technologies--

It was wrapped around high-demand classes and

creative use of providing those high-demand classes.

And you worked with a grant writer or did you do it--

I didn't do that one.

I wrote one of the grants, and the one that I wrote and

received in October was through the USDA.

The call it the RUS grant and I like to call it my grant.

It's actually R-U-S.

It's the Rural Utilities Services Grant.

It's the telecom branch of the USDA and they target rural

communities.

It's a Distance Learning and Telemedicine Group of the US

Department of Agriculture.

And that's the second one we've received of those.

The first one actually built out of a lot of our video

conferencing backbone.

And we wrote the second one deliberately to phase out the

video conferencing and phase in Mediasite.

In the grant and as I talk with other faculty about it, I

call it the best of breed approach.

Because it's a little bit dangerous to point at one

product or two products and say that's

going to meet our needs.

I really like to have a broad enough vision to say there's

lots of things out there.

One I didn't mention is our online tutoring service.

It's been a huge success with students.

And that's a component of all of that.

The other grant that is billing out the next two

classrooms is through Title 5.

Through Title 5.

That's huge.

Can you just tell a little bit about Title 5 that's being

used a lot by folks.

It's traditionally a Hispanic-serving grant-- we

have 41% of our student population is Hispanic--

and working around transfer.

Our Title 5 grant was geared towards the success of

students transferring from our two-year program into a

four-year program.

And I was not the person that wrote the grant.

We have some very talented grant writers on our campus

and I rely heavily on them to help--

You'd better not see their names or they're going to be

recruited by the audience out there.

That's fantastic.

So Title 5.

Excellent source.

And we've seen that around the country as well.

Felix asks this question extremely well.

Is the technology used only for synchronous learning or is

it applicable to asynchronous on-demand learning as well?

It's both.

We've tried to push the synchronous side of it because

we've deliberately used it to replace video conferencing.

Right, to make the model transition smooth so they're

not giving up too much or too much disruption.

Exactly, but virtually every one of our instructors uses it

in some asynchronous fashion.

Almost all of them save their recordings for at least that

quarter and allow their students to review them.

And and we really leave that up to instructors.

Some of the instructors want the student to see it as soon

as it's available.

Others want them to wait until later in the quarter.

So it's really up to the instructor to decide how those

are made available.

We have a catalog, like most people do, that the instructor

has a folder in it and they expose that folder through the

ANGEL classroom.

Totally makes sense.

So the learning management system-- the courseware

management system--

is the final display--

Mm hmm.

--area where--

OK, got it.

And then that gives you even more of your exponential

growth in that, on demand, now you really aren't limited to

even five sessions.

Right.

Who knows where it will go?

Especially when you start talking about asynchronous.

That's kind of where I was going with--

it's a little bit dangerous to say we're

doing online and hybrid.

It really depends on the faculty person.

The instructor--

they have some creative ideas, and it's really my job just to

make them successful.

Another person jumped in on the fact-- and I hope they

heard it right--

the student use or the student review.

Are you using students?

Are students recording Mediasite or did we--

No, just instructors are recording.

Just instructors.

Got it.

Are any of your faculty using Mediasite strictly as an

online course, meaning--

Robert asked this question.

I think what he means it is, where

there's no present class.

Yes, there are some--

A studio format.

Right.

And again, it's in conjunction with ANGEL and Elluminate.

I'll use our psychology instructor as an example.

She's one of the few--

or the growing number-- but she was one of the first that

actually saved her lectures from the different quarters

and goes in and tweaks the slides and uses the same

recorded material from quarter to quarter.

And it's purely online.

All the coursework is up on ANGEL, but the lectures are a

component of that coursework.

So the lectures are Mediasite, the coursework and syllabus

and all that are ANGEL, and then what does she use the

Elluminate for?

Faculty office hours.

For office hours.

Or some tutoring.

Classic trifecta.

That's, honestly, how a lot of people layer those three

technologies together.

Insert your courseware management system there.

Joy asks, how was the response to the only interaction option

being typed question versus the two-way video

conferencing aspect?

We've had a couple of different approaches to it.

Overall, it's been fairly successful.

We have one or two instructors that have moved to Elluminate

because they wanted a more real-time

experience for their students.

And that was more driven by the courseware

that they were teaching.

But overall, it's been very successful.

I just haven't heard any complaints.

I guess that's the best way to put it.

Good.

Good.

So this modality has a big footprint, even when replacing

video conferencing.

Another person asks, how are the classrooms equipped?

Someone always asks this question and it's because we

have a highly technical audience, some of

the members out there.

So they probably want to know, do you have pan tilt zoom

cameras all that such?

Exactly.

The years that we did the video conferencing, we learned

a little bit from that and have plugged it in to what

we're doing today.

We have in integrator that we've worked with

for a number of years.

And we kind of just sat down and started

penciling things out.

Essentially, our best setup has a podium with

two screens on it.

We usually put that at a right angle to the classroom and

then have a height-adjustable table in front of them.

On the height-adjustable table, we have a document

camera and then a display tablet.

Those have become quite successful.

It actually shows you what's on the computer screen, so

when you're writing on it, it's like

writing on a tablet PC.

Instead of having to look at a monitor and guess where your

pen is at, that's been very successful.

We run everything through a Crestron control system, so

they have a touch screen for changing the sources.

This is probably where we put most of our effort and in

design is around the Crestron system.

We were shooting for it being bulletproof.

Really, really simple.

DVD, document camera, PC--

those types of things.

And make it not too fancy.

They can do camera presets through there.

There's a little bit of audio control, but for the most

part, we've kept it as simple as possible.

Because again, the idea was to be able to use this

environment without a technician being in the room

to assistant the faculty member.

Obviously, we have a pan tilt zoom camera in

the back of the room.

And then everything that's run through presentation is put up

on a projector so the students in the class can see

what's going on.

The area where we deviated a little bit was, in the

Mediasite, out of the box, we'll say, they stream your

DVD to the presentation source.

And we did some work in the control system to stream that

to the actual video feed.

So the video source.

And that's helped a lot with the reception of DVD on a

slower connection.

So if I select DVD as a source, my talking head goes

away and the DVD plays there and when I go back to

PowerPoint, my face is back.

Exactly.

That's a good setup.

Many people do that.

It's a very intelligent way to do it.

A couple of people asked-- and this puts you on the spot, but

I'll still ask you in front of this audience--

some people would love to see some more pictures of the

classrooms, so if they email you, could you--

Yeah, absolutely.

-- could you send them-- because people want to see

because they're building just like you.

They want to start where you started.

We'd even be happy to share a line drawing.

Fantastic.

Wow.

That's big.

That's a good thing.

Let's see.

Another question that came in, do you run classes that are

both online and in person at the same time

from the same lecture?

I guess that's a similar question to

Joy's, but go ahead.

Let me make sure I understand it.

We run classes that will have students in front of them, and

there'll be a second session--

or section--

Section.

That's the word I was looking for.

That was the word I couldn't--

--that is online only, and those lectures from the

face-to-face classroom are used in the online class.

So a person is really getting it done two different ways.

They have a pure, 100%, I never came to campus

version going on.

And they have a, I was present, I maybe used the

Mediasite on demand in case I missed class

once or twice, but--

And I heard a brilliant thing--

we've got a philosophy instructor doing this right

now, and he made a comment the other day that he, during the

first week of class, he always opens it up so that if this

modality isn't working for you, you

can switch the sections.

And I think that's brilliant because there are students

that need that face-to-face interaction.

And then there are some that will just flourish in an

online atmosphere.

And he allows them to pick that modality

that works for them.

Got it.

That's excellent.

Another question is about executive support.

You said in your presentation

executive support was important.

Was there a campus mandate to reach x amount of students or

have x amount of faculty using the technology?

Who drove the desire to abandon the legacy technology

of video conferencing, especially in

this type of economy.

OK, the decision to pull the plug on the interactive

classrooms was driven by an administrative decision.

We did not set any mandates or quotas around how many

students or how many faculty would use the new approach to

distance learning.

And quite frankly, we haven't had to.

Right now, our challenge is having enough Mediasite

classrooms. We opened our newest Mediasite classroom on

January 4th and we had faculty coming in over the winter

break, wanting to check out the classroom and start

recording in it.

We literally have faculty lining up at the door to use

these classrooms.

And it's 180 degrees out from where we were with ITV. There

were very few full-time faculty that would teach in

the video conferencing classrooms because of the

reputation.

And we literally, in the course of the year, have had

that reputation completely flipped on its head.

OK, so the majority of people--

and you've made it a stark cut from video conferencing to

Mediasite--

the majority of folks that I deal with are using both

together, happily, in some form.

But we've all grown up with this process.

When you say you had to rebuild trust, was it mainly

because I, as a faculty member, might come in and

there's those five minutes whenever you do a video

conference where it's like, oh, can see the far side?

Can you see me?

Can you hear me?

Where, really, nothing's going until you got everything

online with that great, interactive technology.

Is that the source of the fail?

That was a big part of it.

There was lots of different reasons.

Maybe the remote control-- the batteries died in it or the

link to one of the distance sites went down.

There were as many different reasons as you

could possibly imagine.

But it was just too complicated a technology to--

you could only tame it so far in the environment that you'd

gone to there.

Right.

And so, the Mediasite, you've been able to tame much more.

Right.

And so much so that you could take out the proctor.

Right.

Exactly.

And I should state that the challenge that we've had, in

the transition from video conferencing to streaming, has

been in communicating that with our community.

The notion that we pulled the plug on these classrooms--

we had this physical presence in the community--

that once we took those classrooms offline, we've had

to do some work to ensure them, were still there.

It's just in a different mode.

Oh, right.

So everybody's used to driving to the site.

It's all about the site.

I'm going to the site.

I'm going to the special room.

And now you're like, go to your browser.

Yeah.

And getting that communication piece out there, working with

high school counselors, community members, and we're

still doing that.

The community knowledge centers that

I referenced earlier.

The president and I have made a number of visits to our

communities to talk about, where is a good location?

How do we get the word out to the community?

And we're working with counselors in areas that we

aren't putting those centers in to say,

here's the class schedule.

This is how you figure it out.

Whereas before, we had these five or six sections that we

offered in that site.

And so it was a single piece of paper.

Now it's a class schedule with a whole bunch of opportunity.

Another question is, what has the impact been on class

attendance, in your experience?

That's an ongoing debate.

I think there are two different camps of

understanding.

Initially, we had some concern from faculty that basically

was, well if they can watch this at home at two o'clock in

the morning, what's driving them to come to the classroom?

Because there are a couple of types of modes that you can

have the choice of coming to the campus

or watching it online.

And again, that's really driven by the instructor.

I think, overall, we haven't seen it affect

attendance that much.

We live in a world where students, we make the

assumption that because they spend a good deal of time on

Facebook, they text instead of phone call, and email is old

hat to them, we make the assumption that they aren't

interested in face time.

And it's really the opposite.

The more they plug into technology, the more demand I

see and hear from students about being with that

instructor, understanding what the their

adviser needs from them.

And it's just a little bit of a misconception on our part.

I think the demand for that face-to-face time is even

higher than it was a generation ago.

So a lot of the other questions relate to money.

And so, cost, you make the broad statement that Mediasite

has been more cost effective for you because you've been

able to reduce staff.

Overall, has the approach with Mediasite been less costly

than the polycom approach with other aspects?

Well, if we go back to the slides--

and I could jump back there real quick, just

to give you an idea--

we invested $70 to $80,000 in a site on campus and then

another $60,000 at each distance site.

So across our service district, that might have been

a $300,000 investment, let's just say.

And then we had the staff involved in

maintaining the sites.

We had connectivity costs involved in making sure we had

a secured pipe to each one of those sites.

Where in contrast, with Mediasite, you make the

investment on the local campus.

You build out that classroom---

and this is a very real figure, the $65,000.

Like I said, we opened up our latest one in January.

And that's the hard number of what it cost us to put that

classroom in place.

And I'm not just talking about Mediasite.

I'm talking about the cameras, the projectors, the computer,

the tablet--

The whole thing.

That's an entire classroom--

Everything except furniture.

Yep.

Exactly.

So when you just do that on your local campus, and then--

depending on your district or the area that you're serving,

you may have no investment in the distance sites.

Obviously, you have to put some money into the

communication of making sure people are aware it's there,

but that's where the real savings is at.

And, when you put on top of that the fact that we've been

able to make them what I like to call bulletproof and

transparent, where I don't have to have any of my staff

in there running the room while the class is going on,

over time, that adds up to a lot of money.

And the other piece that we as administrators think about is

those annual maintenance contracts.

And there's a stark difference in what we're paying in annual

maintenance between what we were with video conferencing

and what we are with Mediasite.

Another person mentions, you mentioned post-secondary

education or involvement with K-12.

Can you elaborate?

I think I'll talk about what we do at Washington State.

We have a program we call Running Start where a student,

when they're a junior, can test in.

And they have to test into college-level classes and then

they can enroll their junior and senior year in high school

as a college student.

And they don't have to pay any tuition.

They just pay for their books.

And they can graduate from high school one day, and then

the next week, they can graduate from Big

Bend with an AA.

And that program's been in place for a long time.

And that's what I'm referring to when I talk about talking

to high school counselors, et cetera.

And so, this is my question-- did those students used to

have to go to one of these special three sites?

Yes, if they wanted to stay--

we do have a number of students that come to the main

campus and are there.

The beauty of being able to send it to them is they don't

lose that high school experience.

That's one of the things we debate about Running Start.

They don't get to play on the football team.

They don't get to be involved in the pep rallies and those

types of things.

And so it's a way of bringing some balance back into that

high school experience.

OK, you said you don't depend on enrollment as an indication

of success.

But you have to consider enrollment from a financial

perspective.

Oh, absolutely.

It must be much easier to recruit kids to Running Start

when they don't have to arrange with their parents to

be driven places and all that.

I think it has some benefits--

Is there money in there--

I think the obvious driver behind that is the parents.

They don't have to pay for those two first years of

college, for all intents and purposes.

It's a little bit of a political topic in the state

right now because the schools lose a little funding when the

students come to us-- the K-12.

So being the not very politically correct person

that I am, I think I'll leave that one alone.

Very good.

I'm with you there.

Point taken.

I hear you loud and clear.

It works there.

Another person came in--

please repeat the RUS grant actual source and title, if

you don't mind.

I don't mind at all.

And there's a lot of people who are watching from North

Dakota, they're from Minnesota,

Kansas, stuff like that.

So maybe it applies to them.

It comes from the USDA--

the US Department of Agriculture--

and it's the Distance Learning and Telemedicine Program.

If you do a search on the USDA site for either Rural

Utilities Services Grant or the Distance Learning and

Telemedicine Program, you'll find the site.

And I think their cycle's about come up again.

Last year, we had to submit by the first part of March and I

think that's going to be the same kind of cycle this year.

And if somebody wants to know specifically, could they email

you about that on your last slide?

Absolutely.

Oh, fantastic.

Let's see.

There are two different architectural

questions for us.

I'll take them.

One was, will an audio PowerPoint version of Dr.

Beard's presentation--

you've been granted an honorary Ph.D.--

be available, or just the original PowerPoint?

Anybody who's watching this-- and I forgot to mention this

in housekeeping--

this presentation, in its entirety, will be available

asynchronously as soon as we're done.

So you can share this link and watch him along with the

PowerPoint.

Another person asked, is there a way to download slides in

Mediasite while you're watching them.

And the answer's no.

We stream the slides, keep it secure that way.

If you opt, like Russ did, to add your slide deck to the

Mediasite presentation, like we did, which you can find

under the information icon, the I, you can

download the slides.

But it's an option you affect.

Another person asked, we have an extensive ITV network in

our region and our school has the latest and greatest

technology and equipment.

Once a school has of all the pieces in place, what is the

motivation to change to Mediasite--

which I told you, most people don't change to Mediasite.

They augment their ITV to Mediasite, but you changed,

which we also enjoy--

once the school has all the pieces in shape, what is the

motivation to change to Mediasite or another similar

type platform?

We have two to three ITV classrooms in all 14 high

schools we serve and seven ITV classrooms here on campus.

Comments?

We wrestled with that same decision.

We had made this huge investment.

I think it was really--

as I stated earlier, there were some budget decisions we

had to make.

We just simply couldn't afford to carry on those annual

maintenance agreements or the staff.

That was part of the decision.

But I think the overall piece that really drove us to make

this decision was about making something successful for our

faculty and giving them a tool that they wanted to use.

I really can't stress how difficult it was to get

faculty to use the ITV rooms where we met at that place--

when we started to make that transition.

And we did use Mediasite to augment the video conferencing

classrooms. We did that for about a year and a half.

At first.

At first.

Right, that's when I met you.

Yeah, and so we had some experience with both.

We could see the advantages of both.

And I think that's a healthy approach to take is to give

some time for you to understand both modes, because

they are different, and give your faculty some time to

understand both modes.

This is kind of like looking way back when your libraries

invested in tens of thousands of dollars in videotapes so

they could send them to peoples' homes for the

telecourses.

And at some point, I think a lot of my colleagues across

the nation have probably put those libraries to rest and

have gone to a different mode.

And we, as technologists, are going to see this kind of

thing happen on a fairly regular basis.

And it's a very tough decision because you have a huge

investment in this equipment and it really has to be a

decision that you make locally.

And, I just can't stress enough, you have to get your

faculty involved.

Well, and to answer that question myself as well, there

definitely was, in your particular situation,

different strokes for different folks.

There's different situations.

But it wasn't working the way your faculty wanted it to.

They weren't 100% happy with the way things were going in

your ITV setup.

And if you're in a place where it's working great, then

you're in good shape.

But totally--

what we learn when we go around the country and the

world is that there's so many technologies that are out

there to assist with instruction and to deal with

all the great challenges that we have, that finding

different ways to put them together that work best for

your institution is what we all seek.

And this particular unique way of

getting it done is brilliant.

The last question I'm going to take and get

you off the hot seat.

Project different than

anticipated streamlined process.

During the course of the project, what occurred--

OK, sorry, I butchered her question.

During the course of the project, what occurred that

was different than what you anticipated?

What would you change, if anything, to streamline the

process of setting up your Mediasite infrastructure for

distance learning?

That's a great question.

That is a great question, and I think if I had it to do it

over again, I would probably look at--

I mentioned the piece of curriculum were

working on for faculty.

I would have liked that to be at the leading edge of this

transition, as opposed to a year later.

When we had our kickoff meeting for this curriculum

development about two weeks ago, and it was

startling to me--

startling is probably a little bit over exaggeration--

but it was just such an eye opener for me when I got this

group of faculty in a room and realized that there wasn't a

centrally-located vehicle for them to one, share ideas and

share best practices.

Essentially, each of our faculty was reinventing the

wheel every time they logged into ANGEL, every time they

jumped into a Mediasite classroom.

And once we put that group in the room and started talking,

just the value of that--

when I wrote it into the grant, it was a hunch and

based upon some feedback from faculty--

but the value of that process just jumped through

the roof for me.

And it would have been really advantageous if that was

something we had done a year and a half ago as opposed to

just starting now.

Outside of that, I can't think of anything else, really.

I think that's a great--

More money would be good.

Just streamline the process to make it easier.

If he had it to do over again, he'd get more money.

I think everyone around the world

agrees with that sentiment.

Probably.

I'd like to thank you so much, Russ, for coming all the way

here and doing this great presentation.

We've given out your email a couple times, so I hope you

don't mind that on your way home, you're going to land,

your Blackberry, will be full.

Your iPhone will be full of messages.

I'd like to thank the marketing team at Sonic

Foundry and Sonic Foundry event services for producing

this webcast. And most of all, I'd to thank all of you for

joining us once again for a live webinar about creative

uses of Mediasite around the world.

Thank you very much, and we'll see you the next time.