Echo360 Unveils Web-based Editor for Digital Lectures

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/17/08

Echo360 has announced enhancements to its lecture capture platform, EchoSystem. Foremost is a Web-based editor that gives instructors the option to tailor their recorded lectures.

The Web-based EchoSystem editor requires no software installation by users. Users simply select content from their lecture library and trim content as needed. Master lecture files are preserved so faculty can roll back to the original presentation. As an integrated piece of the EchoSystem platform, a single edit can be universally applied to EchoSystem podcasts, vodcasts, and other digitally recorded lectures.

Also new to the EchoSystem are features for system and campus administrators to use as they scale to campus-wide deployments. A centralized monitoring of the capture process--including the status of audio, video, and VGA feeds--gives administrators real-time health of capture operations across campus. Updated usage reporting allows campus administrators to track the most popular lectures and spikes in system usage to better understand student usage patterns. Increased content security allows the network administrator to use an LDAP/Active Directory system to limit lecture access to authenticated users.

Echo360 is in use at a thousand higher education classrooms around the world, including Arizona State University in Tempe, Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., and Iowa State University in Ames.