UNINETT
Challenge
In Norway there is great student-driven demand for lecture capture and institutions want to provide it. However, it’s difficult for smaller universities and research institutions to offer the technologies needed.
“There is absolutely a demand for lecture capture in Norway. You can ask any student, and he or she would say ‘I want lecture capture,’ ” said Thorleif Hallen, manager, education technologies at UNINETT.
All Norwegian schools and research institutions are connected to UNINETT’s National Research and Education Network. UNINETT aims to remove barriers to technology use within these institutions and empower them to incorporate educational technologies in classrooms, so the logical solution was to add webcasting to its infrastructure.
Solution
UNINETT added Mediasite Enterprise Video Platform to its national IT infrastructure, which means that it’s on a list of cost-effective services available to the institutions. This allows the schools and research institutions to connect any of their Mediasite Recorders to UNINETT’s centrally managed Mediasite webcasting and management platform.
“Everything I’ve been looking for in webcasting tools the last few years is in Mediasite,” Hallen said. “Our members want a technology that allows them to share lectures, support mobile devices and allows for videoconferencing, so selecting Mediasite as a service offering was a natural fit. Mediasite checks off every box and is the best lecture capture system there is.”
Results
Making Mediasite available to colleges and universities across Norway provides schools an economical and scalable infrastructure to record, deliver and manage rich video. UNINETT recently began offering these services to Swedish universities, too.
“The uptick of academic video in Norway is enormous now that schools have access to Mediasite content right at their fingertips,” Hallen said. “Mediasite increases the quality of teaching and communicating. Students get to learn in a more personalized way, and they really appreciate that lecture recordings are available for review on-demand.”
