Off the Page and Onto the Screen: Cisco Boosts Higher Education Teaching With Video Solutions

PHILADELPHIA, PA--(Marketwire - Oct 19, 2011) - Today at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced the release of Cisco^® Lecture Vision, a new solution that can help educators create, manage and share educational content with their students. With the increase in learning environments that combine in-person instruction with virtual interaction, universities, such as Lone Star College, Our Lady of the Lakes University and West Texas A&M University have selected Cisco to implement world-class video-enabled learning environments for their students and educators.

As higher education institutions seek ways to take advantage of existing investments and ensure their graduates are prepared for the competitive global economy of the 21^st century, video has become a critical tool in the classroom. Expertise in network technologies and scaling video applications helps colleges and universities remain competitive as virtual learning experiences are growing in popularity.

Many educational organizations have invested in Cisco video solutions in order to capture, transform and share course content with students both within and beyond traditional classroom settings. Unlike point systems available on the market, Cisco Lecture Vision helps maximize current investments in campus network and existing technology and enables:

• The capability to capture live and recorded lectures in HD to be easily accessed by students anywhere, at any time, on any device, including PCs, smart phones, and tablets.
• Simplified ability to brand and edit content to improve the quality of video production.
• Creation of video libraries, with simple tagging, archiving, and retrieval of stored video assets.
• Educators and students to collaborate on live and recorded content through tools such as social commenting, rating, and word tagging.
• Easy integration with Cisco Pulse^®, a video product that allows users to easily find videos based on what's spoken and who's speaking, allowing you to quickly zero in on portions of videos that are of most interest.
• Integration and interoperability with the existing classroom experience, including interactive whiteboards during the capture process, allowing institutions to maximize current investments.

Cisco Lecture Vision meets the specific needs of educators and students with an elegant integration that is easier for IT managers to deploy. Key elements of the Cisco Lecture Vision solution include:

• Input device: Any video camera can be used as a capture device (utilizing a Cisco encoder).
• Cisco TelePresence^® Content Server: Video can be recorded, streamed, and simple edited before it's published to the Cisco Show and Share^® application.
• Cisco MXE 3500 (Media Experience Engine): Any type of video can be transcoded into a variety of media formats, customized with postproduction features such as trailers and bumpers, and shared on any other device (live or on-demand).
• Digital displays: Video content can be easily streamed to or pre-positioned on Cisco Digital Signs, Cisco TelePresence systems, and desktop, mobile devices or interactive whiteboards.
• Integrated Cisco Pulse Video Analytics: Video content can be searched by speaker or keywords, so that users can easily identify and navigate to the most relevant segments of video.
• Cisco WebEx^® and Cisco TelePresence: These solutions enable immersive teaching and learning from any location, on any device. They can transform any classroom display, projector or smart-board into a 1080p HD meeting space.
• Cisco medianet technology: A Cisco architectural playbook and best practices for a video-ready network infrastructure provide a critical foundation to introducing video traffic over converged network.

Supporting Quotes:

Shar Ardalan, chief information officer, Lone Star College
"The traditional mode and model of education is fundamentally changing because of technology and today's learners' needs and demands. Lone Star College is now providing quality education to more than 85,000 students per semester -- conveniently and affordably. Deploying Cisco Lecture Vision was a no-brainer as it helps us propagate our video assets in a simple and compelling way."

Joseph Deck, chief technology officer, Our Lady of the Lakes University
"Video captures attention in a way that the printed page does not, for communications and learning. Walk around a campus today, and you'll see students viewing videos on their smartphones. Video is fast becoming the way we acquire information and learn these days, and as a university, we need to adapt to our clientele. We are using Cisco Lecture Vision to enable our students to have access to compelling content no matter where they are."

James Webb, chief information officer, West Texas A&M University
"Part of our mission statement is to provide students with a technology-rich education, and video is a major part of our overall IT strategy. Teaching and learning are no longer confined to the classroom. Through Cisco's innovative solutions, we've incorporated video into our web presence, learning-management systems, new digital-signage systems, video-enabled smart classrooms, and video conferencing systems. Video is one of those technologies that everyone immediately understands and has transformed our campus into a 21st-century learning environment."

Renee Patton, U.S. public sector director of education, Cisco
"With today's announcement, Cisco is responding to the growing needs of our education customers in order to enable distance learning initiatives and provide students with access to additional content and resources. The strength of Cisco's network allows universities to feel comfortable with scaling their video technology investments in order to reap the benefits of blended learning environments."

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