Challenge:
The Vanderbilt University School of Nursing in Nashville, Tenn. used a home-grown lecture capture system for several years.
“It wasn’t the greatest. We’d have to piece content together manually and then put videos up on our server for students to download. It got very unwieldy very quickly,” said John Norfleet, Systems Analyst, AV IT, Support Coordinator at the school. “For any one lecture we would have eight different links depending on how a student wanted to access it. We would have to support all of that, and we’d have to know how to troubleshoot a number of scenarios. We got pretty bogged down quickly.”
The school needed one solution that would handle the capture, creation and management of all campus videos and make them easily accessible to students.
Solution:
In the Fall of 2015 the school selected Mediasite by Sonic Foundry for lecture capture and video management.
Faculty can request automated, scheduled recordings of their lectures for on-campus and online students to watch live or on-demand.
In addition to lecture capture, special events, meetings, Ph.D. dissertations and guest speakers are recorded. The videos are hosted on an on-premises server.
Results:
During a recent semester, more than 22,000 hours of video were recorded that received 32,100+ views from students.
“Students really love the ability to adjust the playback speed of Mediasite videos. That’s the one thing they always ask us about,” Norfleet said.
For Norfleet and his team, the fact that faculty can create shortcuts of videos in Mediasite is a big time-saver.
“Before we’d have to make additional copies of videos and now if a faculty member says ‘I need this lecture for this course and it was recorded in this other course,’ I can just go in and create shortcuts between the courses. It’s made that process a lot easier,” he said. “Before Mediasite, I worried a lot about our video system, and now I have no complaints.”