Tag Archives: Video

Stream Globally, Save Locally: Key Benefits of Webcasting Your Event for Live and On-Demand Viewing

Posted by nicolew on 17/10/2012 No comments

New Research Shows Hybrid Events Won’t Cannibalize Your On-Site Attendance

Earlier this month Sonic Foundry sponsored the The Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference. Hundreds of individuals interested in educational technology flocked to London, England to hear from experts in the field and learn what the future holds for classrooms.

One reason the conference was a success: The discussion extended far beyond the physical confines of the conference. The sessions were webcast live to a remote audience via Mediasite by Sonic Foundry.

If would-be attendees weren’t able to get a ticket to attend the in-person event or were unable to make it due to geography, time or budget restraints, they could still participate remotely. All they had to do to feel like they were actually there in person was register using a passcode to get access to sessions via their internet browser. Through the magic of Mediasite they didn’t miss out on anything, and they were able to ask questions and participate in discussions via the Ask button.

Creating hybrid or blended events – meaning a meeting or event has at least one group of face-to-face participants connecting with other participants in one or more additional locations – is becoming more and more common.

New research released by the Meeting Professionals International Foundation and sponsored by Sonic Foundry shares some interesting insights on the topic. MPI surveyed nearly 1,800 meeting planners, attendees, technology vendors and consultants and conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 40 people, and research shows that 70 percent of respondents feel that hybrid meetings will be important to the future of meetings.

Meeting professionals are using hybrid meetings to share content, ideas and experiences with attendees across multiple geographies and time zones. Plus, on-demand content is also important because attendees may not be able to participate at the exact moment the meeting is happening.

The research cited that the potential for cannibalization of the face-to-face meeting is a concern of 50 percent of those surveyed. However, this concern appears to be largely unsubstantiated. The data suggests that face-to-face attendance increased or remained flat – 88 percent of planners who have done hybrid meetings say there’s been no negative impact on onsite attendance.

By going hybrid and streaming your content live and on-demand you’ll be extending your reach, creating instant online video libraries of knowledge that can be reviewed anytime and you’ll allow many more people to attend your event. Just ask the University of London Computer Centre (organizer of FOTE). Going hybrid is a win-win.

Mediasite by Sonic Foundry is used for video management and academic, enterprise and event webcasting. Its Mediasite Events group is a leading provider of event webcasting for hybrid events and high-profile meetings. Voted one of the “Best Technology Tools” by Professional Convention Management Association’s Convene Magazine readers, the group supplies technical webcasting services and expertise to organizations who seek to complement their conference or event with viewing over the web. The Mediasite Events group provides live and on-demand webcasting for Fortune 500 corporations, university associations, sporting events and charitable organizations globally.

For more information, please visit http://www.sonicfoundry.com/ or call 877.783.7987 toll free. You can also download the research report at http://mpiweb.org/hybrid (free to MPI members and available for purchase for non-members) and read a recent blog post from Sonic Foundry called “10 Tips to Create A Successful Hybrid Event.”

- Nicole Wise, Sonic Foundry

One Company’s Use of Webcasting Brings Employees Together

 

FOTE12 Goes Hybrid with Mediasite by Sonic Foundry

Posted by nicolew on 04/10/2012 No comments

One Company’s Use of Webcasting Brings Employees Together
Photo credit: Sonic Foundry, Inc.

The Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference in London, England always sells out fast to IT directors and managers, learning technologists, practitioners and anyone else interested in educational technology.

But if you weren’t able to secure a ticket to this week’s conference, you can still participate and feel like you’re actually there, because FOTE is being webcast for the first time to a remote audience via Mediasite by Sonic Foundry. That way, even more people from all over the world will be able to watch online from the comfort of their offices or homes.

All of the sessions will be live streamed via Mediasite 6, which will allow attendees, both on-site and online, to watch sessions from their mobile devices in real time. The recordings will also be archived for on-demand viewing, creating an instant online video library of knowledge about IT trends in classrooms that can be reviewed at any time.

To join remotely all you need to do is register on the Mediasite events website using the ‘FOTE2012‘ passcode. If you are planning to watch the FOTE12 live stream from a desktop computer please make sure you install the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight.

Making FOTE a hybrid event this year by simultaneously offering face-to-face and online experiences, allows the University of London Computer Centre, the conference organizer, to reach and engage a much larger audience.

Worldwide, 1,100 colleges and universities use Mediasite and its video content management system to quickly and cost-effectively automate the capture, management, delivery and search of live and on-demand streaming videos and rich media presentations. Sonic Foundry has been named Frost & Sullivan’s Global Market Share Leader in Lecture Capture Solutions for six consecutive years.

Check out www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasite to learn more.

– Nicole Wise, Sonic Foundry

Learning is personal. So is video.

Posted by James Cross on 28/09/2012 No comments

We all had a favourite teacher at school. One who inspired us, engaged us, and above all, really connected with us on a personal level. And it’s this personal connection that’s at the heart of the best learning that happens in our schools and universities. Students aren’t hard disks that can simply be filled with information, facts and figures – and the best learning happens when their imaginations are sparked, and they’re able to apply their learning in practical and useful ways.

Schools and universities are facing a challenge. They know that great teaching is happening in their classrooms and lecture theatres, but they also know that they need to be providing great online tools and content for students to access outside of their gates. And they’re often aware that the traditional ways of doing this aren’t well suited to the connected, mobile generation of students that are sat in their classrooms and lecture halls.

PowerPoint files uploaded to a learning platform just don’t cut it any more – especially for a generation that have grown up with Facebook and YouTube. Condense a lesson or lecture into a PowerPoint file, and it just ends up being a dry collection of bullet points and facts – the opposite of good teaching.

Online video though, is a different story. Video retains the ‘secret sauce’ of great teaching – the humour, the pace, and the human connection between teacher and student. With video, it’s personal – and many institutions are starting to see online video as the best way to provide meaningful learning resources to support and spark students’ learning.

Put yourself in the shoes of a high school or university student for a moment, and consider which of these resources you’re more likely to be engaged by: a Word document with pages of bullet points, or a ten minute video of your teacher or lecturer explaining those same concepts to the camera, in a format that you can stream to your iPhone? Even better, imagine being given the chance to create your own video content to demonstrate your learning, and sharing this with your peers. There’s no contest – video wins hands down for student engagement and learning, every time.

But educators’ time is precious – and with the best will in the world, if something’s time consuming and complicated, then they’ll struggle to fit it into their teaching and hectic schedule. Video has always been a powerful tool for learning, but up until now, using it regularly in the classroom just wasn’t viable for the busy educator who didn’t have the time to fight with DV tapes, cables and tricky editing software.

And even where educators had created video content for learning, there wasn’t a quick and easy way to safely share it with their students. Traditional online learning platforms don’t handle video well, and public video sharing sites such as YouTube don’t offer the control and security that’s needed to ensure student safety and enable their safe engagement.

All of this has now changed, though – and the time has come for video-based learning to be bringing every classroom, lecture theatre and corporate training room to life. The first part of the puzzle has been solved by easy to use video capture devices like the Flip camera, iPhone and iPad – meaning that capturing and editing high-quality video is no longer a complicated and time consuming affair.

The safe online video platform that MediaCore offers completes the second part of the puzzle – giving institutions an engaging online video platform over which they have complete control – with student-centric features such as mobile playback and moderated commenting. Crucially, it’s quick and easy for educators, letting them capture and upload videos on the go using the MediaCore Capture app, and upload video resources via the web without having to worry about file type or size. Online video is the most engaging way for institutions to share learning content with their students – and with MediaCore, educators can be safely and easily doing this in minutes.

Great teaching has the power to inspire, to engage, and to change lives. And by using MediaCore to extend the learning with online video, schools and universities can make a real difference to their students’ learning experiences.

James Cross, Educator in Residence, MediaCore

Making ripples in a big pond: Optimising FOTE10 videos with an iTitle Twitter track

Posted by mhawksey on 01/11/2010 2 comments

With 24 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube, your videos can quickly be lost within a sea of content. Not only this, but because videos have historically been difficult for search engines to catalogue, your drop in the ocean of content can become indistinguishable from everything else.

It’s not surprising therefore that the current kings of search and owners of YouTube, Google, announced that in March 2010 that video’s on YouTube would be auto-captioned. Whilst this announcement is pitched at improving accessibility for the hearing impaired, it also means there is wider accessibility in terms of how the videos are indexed and ultimately searched. Need proof? The following Google search returns this video, which convenient also highlights the value of captioning videos for search engine optimisation.

But what if you have conference videos or other educational resources, like lecture capture, which isn’t on YouTube? There are a number of options to captions including: using standalone voice recognition software, various caption/annotation tools, professional captioning, or just sitting down and manually writing captions in a text editor. All of these potentially have a cost associated with them. If only there was a way you could crowdsource captions … hold that thought.

A well as the rise in popularity of video, conference delegates are increasingly using the micro-blogging service Twitter to share ‘What’s happening’ with other participants as well those further afield. For many this is becoming a valuable medium allowing the individual to find voice in a format which is usually dominated by whoever is standing at the front of the room. At the same time conference organisers are benefitting, from what is usually thousands of tweets, amplifying and raising the profile of the event.

The record of conference tweets is arguably a resource which is equally as valuable as any conference proceedings, papers, posters, videos, but the nature of a tweet means if not consumed in the moment then they can potentially loose context. And it is here that two worlds collide. Using what was said by the audience to caption a video of the presentation, contextualising ‘what’s happening’ with what happened.

The idea of Twitter Powered Subtitles for Conference Audio/Videos on Youtube was first proposed in March 2009 by Tony Hirst which presented a method for extracting conference tweets and creating a subtitle file for YouYube. Almost a year later in February 2010 the idea was revived in Twitter powered subtitles for BBC iPlayer which saw the publication of the online Twitter subtitling tool iTitle.

iTitle integrates with the JISC supported Twitter archive service Twapper Keeper to generate subtitle files in different formats as well as playing back video clips from different sources with subtitle overlays. Since March the evolution of this tool has been improved following feedback from users to incorporate features like backchannel filtering, embedding subtitled videos in other sites, and a RESTful interface.

A number of conferences have now enhanced their video archive with timed tweets  including the JISC Conference, ALT-C and the Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW). FOTE10 is the latest event to get the ‘iTitle’ treatment and links to the videos are contained below:

The hypothesis was that providing providing a twitter subtitle track would improve the discoverability of FOTE10 videos. Does it work? Well if anyone is ever searching for an “ed tech jackanory” there should be a happy ending.

Martin Hawksey

By day:
e-Learning Advisor (Higher Education)
JISC RSC Scotland North & East

By night:
Coding Hobbyist (Mashed Ed)
Edinburgh

What features make online videos of lessons/lectures useful and valuable?

Posted by Frank Steiner on 19/07/2010 No comments

Over the weeks leading up to FOTE10 I’ll be offering my experience in delivering online video in exchange for your experience of the needs of the education community.  Hopefully we’ll conclude with a happy marriage of necessity and invention.

Given that increases in bandwidth and portable devices capable of viewing video is leading to the explosion of online content – what is the best way of presenting video online and what should be included in the experience?  Over a series of blog postings, I’ll be trying to discover a consensus and your favourite resources to establish how best to combine one/more/all of:

- video
- slides
- live demonstrations
- learning management systems
- chat
- voting
- assignments

In an ideal world, the series will conclude with a (inevitably contentious) statement on best practise for various types of lectures and various types of courses.

To get things started I’ll simply ask:  What sort of lectures/lessons are the best candidates for being converted to online video resources?  (Guest lectures, MBA courses, seminars, workshops, …)

Duncan Burbidge
CEO of Stream UK

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