To say the University of Florida is dedicated to providing comprehensive, high-quality video services to its faculty, staff and students is an understatement. Since 2004, the institution has used Mediasite products from Sonic Foundry to allow users to create, publish, share and manage videos.
“We have used Mediasite for over a decade to capture lectures and to record and live-stream events across campus,” says Brian Smith, IT manager for University of Florida’s IT video and collaboration services. “Mediasite gave us the ability to automatically record and publish lectures, making them available in easily embeddable catalogs.”
Serving all needs
My Mediasite, which the institution implemented in 2012, is a desktop capture tool that allows users to create video using their laptop’s built-in camera. In 2015, UF added Mediasite Join as its cloud-based source for video recording and on-demand storage. Mediasite Join is the equipment-free way to capture content, and the search interface for past videos is easy and engaging. But users looking for a full-service experience can use UF’s video and audio studio, which contains an audio booth and green screen room and is equipped with Mediasite video and slide capture technology.
“Before Mediasite our students watched lectures,” says Smith. “Now they experience lectures.”
And they experience lectures in large quantities. Views have increased 330 percent year over year. In 2014, viewership of Mediasite presentations exceeded 2.6 million. By 2015, views jumped to 3.6 million.
Facilitating better instruction
UF strategically uses Mediasite to improve students’ learning experience. In “Introduction to Statistics,” dual video captures both the lecture and the instructor solving problems on a laptop. This enhanced viewing experience benefits more than 2,000 students who watch each lecture. Instructors in the Department of Physics use a glass chalkboard to write notes and draw equations while facing the camera. Recordings of these impactful, high-quality lectures are uploaded to Mediasite for students to review anytime, anywhere.
The latest in Mediasite’s suite of offerings is Mediasite Catch, which expands automation to classrooms that lack a proper AV setup. Among its features is automatic scheduling. When faculty can push schedules into Mediasite Catch, their recordings start, stop and publish on time with zero manual effort. The automated workflow allows professors to focus on their instruction.
“Mediasite Catch allows us to notably scale our deployment of Mediasite recording solutions to potentially all centrally supported learning spaces across campus without having to heavily invest in additional hardware,” says Smith. “Mediasite will continue to be an important part of our institution in the future as demand for online video increases. With Mediasite, we engage in the learning experience.”
This piece was produced for Sonic Foundry by University Business. For more information, visit www.sonicfoundry.com/solutions/education
