Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Challenge: 

As the start of the coronavirus outbreak posed a serious threat worldwide in early 2020, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) needed to avoid the spread of the infection between and beyond campuses.  

The joint venture university founded by XJTLU in China and University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom already had the technology infrastructure in place for online learning, having used Mediasite for lecture capture since 2017 as a study tool for its 14,000 students around the world. Now, it needed to go a step further, converting to a fully virtual campus amidst quarantines and travel bans.   

Solution: 

The university fast-tracked a massive Mediasite expansion that gave all faculty access to My Mediasite personal capture software. In a matter of days it converted to an online campus, with 70 percent of the 450 courses available online via Mediasite.  

The university worked closely with Mediasite’s professional services to reconfigure its deployment and accelerate its desktop video capture strategy. The team ensured enough bandwidth and storage to stream and manage the videos with minimal disruptions for teaching and learning and continues to work with XJTLU to ensure its on-premises infrastructure supports the online classes. 

Results: 

The university acted extremely fast in the face of the outbreak and was well-prepared with an academic continuity plan that included Mediasite.  

Nearly all 14,000 students began studying when the semester was scheduled to start, and the usage data was unprecedented. XJTLU professors both within China and around the world use My Mediasite to create or upload lecture videos from home for students.  

During the first two days of the semester alone, faculty created more than 2,000 lecture videos which students viewed nearly 100,000 times in the university’s Moodle learning management system. 

It is a development which XJTLU considers progressive and far reaching according to the University’s Executive President, Professor Youmin Xi. 

“We decided to conduct our education fully online, including support from Mediasite, until campus re-opens because of concern for the health of students and staff members,” said Professor Xi. “However, increasing our online education capabilities to complement onsite education, or education provided by an educator physically present with students, has long been part of our path forward. The epidemic simply sped up the timeline of our plans to move toward a new learning ecosystem we envision for XJTLU’s future that blends the best of online and onsite education methodologies.” 

Read more in this Campus Technology article, Remote Learning on the Fly: Notes from China.