Contact Information: Contact: Mary Young Director, Marketing Echo360 (703) 963-2467
Columbia Business School Expands Echo360(R) Lecture Capture Department Wide
Top Business Program Affirms Benefits of Widespread Capture for All Students
| Source: Echo360
DULLES, VA--(Marketwire - May 12, 2009) - Echo360, higher education's first choice for
allowing students to relive the classroom experience on demand, today
announced that Columbia Business
School is using the EchoSystem platform in eight classrooms to enhance
teaching and learning with lecture capture.
Columbia Business School multimedia staff is seasoned in using traditional
video production techniques to capture classroom recordings. While the
results have been satisfactory, the manual effort to produce a single
lecture became unsustainable with burgeoning demand from Executive MBA
students. Columbia evaluated other methods, and identified the EchoSystem
as the solution that delivers the same high-quality experience at a lower
cost and with improved operational efficiencies. The EchoSystem automates
the process by scheduling, capturing, packaging and publishing rich media
lectures and academic podcasts.
"The technology design of the EchoSystem was pivotal to making it Columbia
Business School's preferred solution," said Chris Bellerjeau, director of
multimedia services at Columbia Business School. "We've discovered that the
more classrooms we bring online, the less manual the capture process
becomes."
The EchoSystem
provides significant advantages over first-generation presentation
recording systems and gives Columbia Business School a means to scale to
all 26 of its classrooms. The EchoSystem captures native H.264 video,
pushes the media encoding out of the classroom to a backend server and
creates a
high-quality digital master that can be archived for future repurposing.
The system design also allows for flexibility in viewing format -- the
H.264 stream is converted into the ubiquitous Flash format and multiple
podcasting formats. Students can view the lectures on any computer platform
through any browser or access podcasts on an iPod® or other mobile
device.
"We needed the best video solution available. Echo360 provides us with a
clear path back to original media, making it the future-proof choice for
lecture capture," continued Bellerjeau. "We've experienced the trials and
tribulations of the format wars, but Flash has 99% browser penetration.
Since moving to Echo360, we've experienced a great decline in support calls
from students."
Columbia Business School capitalizes on its location in the heart of
Manhattan as a competitive advantage to attract top professionals seeking
graduate business and financial degrees. Columbia emphasizes
in-class attendance to foster critical thinking and interpersonal skills,
using lecture capture as a complement to its face-to-face instruction.
"There is documented value to allowing students to review classes online.
Echo360 lecture capture gives students a better overall experience at
Columbia," explained Bellerjeau. "Likewise, the EchoSystem creates a better
environment for those of us responsible for delivering the service. The
EchoSystem capture appliance was the deciding factor for us -- we simply
don't have the time to deal with PCs, which were the drivers of the capture
process in the old model."
"Columbia Business School exemplifies what happens in an institution when
lecture capture catches on. As demand increases, the operational stresses
can make or break an institution's ability to deliver the service," said
Mark Jones, president of Echo360. "The EchoSystem platform addresses those
barriers to widespread adoption. We're thrilled to be working with an
innovator like Columbia Business School."
About Echo360
Echo360 envisions an opportunity for every student to be freed from
traditional barriers to learning with an on-demand education experience.
Full-time, part-time, distance, continuing, and online all describe today's
student living in a 24/7 world. On-demand media and education converge at
Echo360, helping colleges and universities engage students on the students'
terms with full and unbounded access to classroom-based content via
multiplatform replay. Developed in partnership with the University of
Western Australia, Echo360 means scalable and affordable lecture capture
solutions that can provide institutions of all sizes with universal
availability of lecture content. Learn more at http://www.echo360.com.