For the past decade, watching lectures on mobile devices has been all the rage. Now, universities are taking mobile to the next level, leveraging students’ devices as part of their campus video initiatives. Cell phones and tablets are turning everyone – faculty and students alike – into not just content consumers but content creators.
Incorporating videos in the classroom isn’t a luxury anymore – students demand and expect to have their lectures streamed. And the data backs that up.
Our research shows that at minimum, a student watches a Mediasite video every single second of every single day. Mediasite views are growing by 89 percent and video creation is growing by 49 percent year-over-year. While campus video is a niche category of internet video, its growth rate is anything but. It’s exceeding the growth rate of entertainment video online.
All that to say, BYOD is enabling the rapid creation of content on campuses, and colleges and universities need to have a solid strategy to support this explosion of video learning. An easy way to start is with video capture software.
We sat down with Rob Lipps, executive vice president of Sonic Foundry, to talk about the acceleration of video creation on campuses and how institutions can support this demand with technology solutions.
Q: Why do colleges and universities need to have prolific video initiatives?
A: Video in the classroom is proven to increase student outcomes, learning and retention. For example, University of the Free State in South Africa saw student pass rates jump from 26 percent to 100 percent in some rural high schools. And a student survey at University of Maryland Baltimore Dental School showed that 97 percent of students felt video made it easier to learn – 98 percent said they watch most or all of their lectures online. A medical school in Japan saw exam results improve to nearly 100% after deploying video capture in their classrooms.
Q: What’s the watershed moment for campus video?
A: The more you create, the more viewers are able to consume and subsequently they demand more. Video is as much as culture as it is a technology, and momentum is critical to long term adoption and success. The watershed moment for video on campus is enabling the broad scale creation of video from everywhere learning is happening. Mobile plays a huge factor in that.
The volume of video and velocity of content creation is your biggest friend in the success of your video strategy, and there needs to be a cadence of new content every day, every hour. All that video is driving viewership.
Q: What’s the easiest way to start building a solid video strategy?
A: For institutions looking to build a solid video strategy to support user-generated content, the easiest place to start is equipping existing teaching spaces with video capture technology. Put the focus on capturing spaces where content owners are already comfortably presenting. From there, deploy personal capture solutions designed for content owners. Personal software capture technologies are extremely effective at empowering content owners to quickly and effectively share knowledge using video while at the same time making them more comfortable communicating with video. Organizations will quickly identify the early adopters who can lead by example.
The latest version of Mediasite makes getting started with lecture capture simple, and flexible deployment options mean it’s perfectly sized to fit the needs of any department, campus and budget. Instructors can produce high-quality lectures and videos, and students get the flexibility to study and review as often as they please.
My Mediasite, a content-owner portal that includes our Mediasite desktop capture software, enables anyone to create, edit and share videos on any device. Even if the videos aren’t created in Mediasite, you can upload and manage them in Mediasite so you have one central and secure campus video showcase.
For lower technology classrooms with dedicated PC’s, Mediasite Catch software can be installed to bring fully automated, scheduled or ad-hoc capture to those rooms.
Q: Why are workflows so important?
A: Workflows are the unsung heroes of any successful video strategy, and the failure point for those that are unsuccessful. We obsess about workflows. Beyond the tools that generate the content, most important is making sure the content finds its audience. Having well-integrated workflows to move user-generated content off of desktops and mobile devices and seamlessly present them to the viewers is key. Desktop capture software alone won’t deliver the results you’d expect. What is most important is the relationship between the desktop capture software and the video management system itself.
When you have your video capture solution tied to an enterprise video platform you can effectively manage the content. When My Mediasite and Mediasite Catch are paired with Mediasite Video Cloud, you can be sure all video is secure and reliably published, streamed and managed.
Recording videos is just one step, though. Making sure you have the ability to manage and deliver all that video will help drive the adoption of your program.
Q: Why consider room-based software capture?
A: Desktop capture tools are a great first step, but they are not designed to take advantage of infrastructure that exists in a room nor are they designed to support multi-use environments. Capture software should work with the other technologies in classrooms such as cameras, audio equipment and projectors. More importantly, a multi-use environment such as a general purpose classroom requires capture technologies that can facilitate full automation or completely ad-hoc use cases. Software like Mediasite Catch is a great option for classrooms with limited AV or budget constraints, enabling day-to-day video and content recording from classrooms PCs with automated, scheduled and ad-hoc capture. It works with existing classroom technology, running inconspicuously in the background.
Q: A video initiative sounds great, but what if budgets are tight or campuses are small?
A: Regardless of the size of your school, your needs are the same. Often the only difference between a 3,000- and 40,000-student university is the number of classrooms and desktops. The workflow requirements are identical. With our campus and department license bundles, campuses of any size can benefit from sharing the same technology and price points that are appropriate to the size of the school and budget, while ensuring unlimited capture and unlimited viewing.
The need to create video is on every single corner of a university. Our job as technologists is to satisfy that need by delivering innovative technology to enable you to proliferate video as broadly, or as focused, as you desire. My Mediasite on every desktop. Mediasite Catch in every classroom. Unlimited viewership included in all bundles.
As we inch closer to 2018, reach for academic success by creating a solid video strategy that allows your campus to grow as quickly as the expectations of your students.
