Hopefully you watched our recent webinar ‘How to Create A Cohesive Lecture Capture Program: One College’s Journey’ (if you haven’t, you can watch here).
Our guest, Michelle Reed, Online Video Strategist at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) in Ohio, shared her school’s experience with creating a cohesive solution for lecture capture and video management across its four campuses.
Prior to selecting Mediasite, Tri-C faculty and students used five different video solutions to create and watch lectures and assignments. Videos were posted all over the place (YouTube, their LMS, personal websites, etc.) and Tri-C staff wasted a lot of time and money trying to effectively manage all of that content. All that changed with Mediasite. The Tri-C team created a solid campus video strategy and learned a lot along the way.
Questions came pouring in for Michelle during the webinar, and we didn’t have time to get to all of them. She graciously answered the rest of the questions below. Be sure to watch the webinar first for context, if you missed it.
Q: Since the campus migration of capturing and streaming to Mediasite, do you have a common portal and console with features that are simple to navigate?
A: We use the My Mediasite portal for faculty to manage their videos and the Mediasite Desktop Recorder for the faculty to create new content. We have it integrated into our LMS, Blackboard, but we also allow our faculty to access the My Mediasite portal by using a secure and direct URL.
Q: How did the integration go with Blackboard?
A: Most aspects of the integration went as planned. Our Blackboard is self-hosted so we had some certificate issues but were able to work through them on our end. Blackboard was cooperative in assisting us with diagnosing our roadblock and what we should do to move past it.
Our faculty and staff really liked the way that Mediasite integrated into our Blackboard LMS. They also like the fact that they could manage all of their content in one location inside Blackboard. Mediasite can be accessed through Blackboard, and that was very important to them as well.
Q: Are your servers physically on premises or do you have a cloud alternative?
We do subscribe to Mediasite’s cloud service, Mediasite Video Cloud.
Q: How did you calculate the amount of bandwidth and the amount of storage?
A: We chose our initial amount of storage based on the amount of legacy content that was currently stored and then added about 25% to allow for newly created content.
Q: How does that relate to the actual use reality?
A: Our faculty are creating content. We are happy about that. We have now doubled our storage as we are still adding more of the legacy content and our faculty are adding and creating more of their own!
Michelle did answer these next two questions during the webinar, but it’s such an important topic. So, let’s include it here again!
Q: It sounds like you have a really nice faculty training professional development program there to get everyone up and running. There are always going to be reluctant faculty, however. What tips do you have to get them to embrace the technology and not run from it?
A: We have faculty members that are very much into the technology and very afraid, so I think Mediasite allows the faculty to just go in, create a lecture, and share it with their students– very simple, very elementary, easy to do. We kind of call it ‘down and dirty,’ just do a quick recording so your students can see it.
But then it also allows faculty members to add quiz questions, and create engagement pieces for the students, and edit them, and share channels, and have threaded discussions on the channels. So it kind of speaks to a whole range of faculty, depending on their technology comfort level. And so for the faculty members who are maybe not as tech savvy, we have different areas on campus. They call them the Center for Learning Excellence. The people there are also trained to work one-on-one with faculty members.
Q: What are the top marketing activities you did to get faculty on board would you say? You said you’re doing some on-boarding with them.
A: We did campus visits to get them excited. The Center of Learning Excellence had also communicated with the faculty members the different things that Mediasite can do, so they can think about it before it’s here, the use cases of what they can do with it. I think it’s very important for faculty to hear from each other. And so again, just lots of communication, lots of personal e-mails, lots of reaching out, and hand shaking, and meeting up with faculty to let them know: ‘We’re here to have Mediasite as a benefit for them and their students and not be scared it. We’re here to help to make it super easy.’
I had a faculty member yesterday say to me: ‘So I get the recorder. I upload my content. What’s the catch?’ Well there is no catch. It’s just as easy as that. So they were really excited. It was really cute.
Here’s that link again to watch the full webinar. You can also learn more here. Enjoy!