BlogU

  • Tandberg, Cisco and Lecture Capture

    By Joshua Kim October 1, 2009 9:43 pm EDT

    The announcement today of Cisco's offer of $3 billion to buy the video conferencing company Tandberg could potentially have significant implications in the lecture capture market.

    Tandberg's product lineup was built for video conferencing. Tandberg's products range from Telepresence systems to high-end HD conferencing gear. Additionally, Tandberg sells a PC based mobile video conferencing system called Movi.

    This product lineup, however, contains all the parts necessary for a robust and flexible lecture capture system. Tandberg has well developed management software and appliances for encoding, management, and distribution. Cisco may be purchasing Tandberg to gain scale in the video conferencing space (as well as to offer integrated networking gear and services that video conferencing depends), but they are also collecting all the pieces necessary to provide presentation and lecture recording.

    Lecture and presentation capture will be as important in the higher education space as video conferencing is in the enterprise (and increasingly small business) sectors. Tools, platforms and services to easily record campus activity - whether this activity is a regular lecture, an invited speaker, or a voice-over recording made from a professors desk - are poised to become ubiquitous on campus. Students will expect the ability to time shift their learning. Faculty will come to understand that recorded presentations offer the potential to free class time for discussion and debate, as students escape the pressure of having to take exhaustive notes during the lecture. Parents will look for schools that record lectures as an aid to their child's learning, as students with diverse learning style can take advantage of recorded classes to review materials at their own pace.

    The higher education market is an important one for Cisco. Colleges and universities have historically been out front in providing fast wired (and wireless) connections through their community. As more of campus life is recorded and shared the role of the campus network, and its networking gear, will only grow in importance. The ability to integrate video conferencing (which higher education leaders will also be utilizing to a greater degree along with everyone else) with presentation and lecture capture may offer a compelling value proposition. Campuses could effectively get two services (lecture capture and video conferencing) for the cost and complexity of one.

    I'm not sure if lecture/presentation capture entered at all into Cisco's calculus in making the Tandberg offer. I sort of doubt it did, given that Tandberg is not really in this space now. However, I could see further Cisco acquisitions down the road of pure lecture capture companies such as Tegrity or Echo 360. Cisco is sitting on $35 billion in cash and has been on an acquisition spree. Either of these companies could fit very well with Tandberg's existing solutions and would provide Cisco with an opportunity to up-sell video conferencing and network equipment.

    What do you think? Do you see a future in which Cisco gets into the lecture/presentation capture business?

Go to comments (3) »
Advertisement

Comments on Tandberg, Cisco and Lecture Capture

  • Redesigning The Precious Lecture Time
  • Posted by Ed Garay at University of Illinois at Chicago on October 2, 2009 at 9:00am EDT

  • "Faculty will come to understand that recorded presentations offer the potential to free class time for discussion and debate, as students escape the pressure of having to take exhaustive notes during the lecture."

    I don't think Tandberg brings much to Cisco in terms of lecture capturing per se, but I do foresee that lecture capture recordings will become one more mainstream piece of educational materials on every course Website, akin the syllabus or the gradebook.

    For years, I have been advocating cloning ourselves, that is, asynchronous cloning of instructors, so that, we can indeed repurpose that precious lecture time for discussion, brainstorming and for emphasizing key concepts and difficult-to-understand material.

    What better value to offer our ultimate customers (the students) than to increase the time they have to talk, to have a conversation, with our knowledge-expert faculty?

    At UIC, we have been doing "lecture recording" for many years, like most other universities. Well, not really, but for many years now, it has become increasingly easier for instructors to put content online, not just the syllabus and a couple of class handouts, but a gamut of valuable content, like voice-narrated PowerPoint presentations, voice-narrated synthesized mini-lectures, entire class audio Podcasts, ad hoc class Podcasts, sample PDFs of old exams and class projects, short video clips and Flash animations, class blogs, class wikis, on-demand archives of live Webcasts and past Web Conferencing-facilitated review lectures and beam-the-guest-speaker presentations, interactive learning modules, and so forth, which is so easy to do and distribute with Blackboard, for example.

    Adding true automated hands-free lecture capturing (invisible technology) is like icing on the cake. Now, we have all the asynchronous materials, handouts, blogs, Podcasts and whatnot *and* on-demand archives of what actually transcribed in class.

    With everything online and no need for students to frantically take notes, we finally have the students' undevoted attention, so what could ever be missing?

    What might be missing and overlooked is redesigning the lecture to be in tune with the rich peripheral educational content now available to everyone. No need to repeat everything that is online already. We should teach differently, better, primarily, by engaging our students in real-time dynamic conversation, in a mix of we teach/we talk, we teach/we talk lecture passages. Sounds simple, but redesigning 45+ lectures per class/semester can be a formidable task, depending on the subject ...and on the willingness of the faculty member to evolve and redesign the way we teach...

    Back to lecture capturing technology, I don't think Tandberg brings to Cisco what is really needed for a good lecture capture system, namely: improved/intelligent video navigation (more granular control over thumbnail video navigation) built-in transcription and closed-captioning to make lecture recordings accessible and to allow for search jump-to navigation, better (more intelligent) integration with LMS systems like Blackboard (it should be easy to change the lecture capture text links, put the links anywhere we wish, or use LMS release dates to control when to hide/display or otherwise make available links to the class recordings).

    Lecture capture systems need simple controls for faculty to deal with copyrighted content. Giving a traditional live lecture using copyrighted content under Multimedia Fair Use is one thing; doing the same while the lecture is being recorded for on-demand playback is an entirely different proposition.

    We need simple controls to pause/resume recording, be able to skip recording of computer screens or motion video for copyright reasons; we could continue talking about the copyrighted content, show it in class, but not have it recorded.

    We also need much better scheduling tools to automate scheduling and to be able to program every conceivable scheduling exception, because with hundreds upon hundreds of lectures and presentations taken place on our campuses every day, there are lots and lost of scheduling exceptions. Better authentication options as well, to protect access to the recordings, in a variety of ways.

    Lecture capture systems also need to support a much richer set of recording formats, let each institution decide what to pick and where to store and how to deliver each recording format. What do you mean, I have to use Silverlight? Why do I have to pick: Flash Video or QuickTime? Perhaps, we want both! Why will the Podcasts only work on iPods? The year is 2009. We live in a diverse and heterogeneous e-Learning continuum. Don't make me pick one or the other; I want both. We need options and granular institutional controls.

    Playback should be universal.
    If my cell phone can play something, it should play lecture recordings.

    Needless to say, I much rather work helping our faculty make effective use of teaching and learning technology (new or not so new), and realizing the potential benefits of redesigning the way we teach to enhance learning.

    *** Go Chicago Olympics 2016 ***

  • responding to Ed
  • Posted by Josh Kim on October 2, 2009 at 9:30am EDT

  • Hi Ed.....first - GO CHICAGO 2016! I agree with everything you say about where lecture captures need to go. You are exactly correct that lecture capture technology represents an opportunity to rethink and redesign how we develop and deliver lectures. The course/lecture redesign process is the most challenging aspect, and opportunity, presented by the new lecture capture technology. It would be great to hear more about the tools that you are using at UIC - as well as what you have learned about the course redesign process. As for Cisco/Tandberg - you are not wrong - I'm trying to be a bit provocative....Cisco certainly has the resources (and now the technologies) to do everything we want in a lecture capture system. Thanks again for your great post...Josh

  • Tanadberg IP VCR's
  • Posted by Rick McDonald , Online & Media Services at Coconino Community College on October 5, 2009 at 11:45am EDT

  • Sure, Tandberg doesn't offer a campus wide lecture recording capability like Tegrity, but their IP VCR products do allow recordings of video conferencing. Many schools with a large geographic footprint, like ours, use the video conferencing systems of Tandberg and Polycom to offer classes.Those can be recorded simply using the IP VCR systems. I think these systems could be used to record video more broadly if the price came down. As far as the intellectual property and copyright concerns. I thought that copyrighted materials may be placed in web courses as long as they are password protected. Didn't the TEACH act established this?

Print
© Copyright 2011 Inside Higher Ed