Cisco Releases Lecture Capture System

• By Leila Meyer
• 10/25/11

Cisco has released Lecture Vision, a solution to help educators capture and share educational materials with students. Cisco Lecture Vision is a suite of modular solutions backed by a set of services created specifically for education institutions. It encompasses user creation of multimedia; presentation capture; campus media-asset management and distribution; capture, archive, and retrieval tasks; and live video streaming. While "lecture capture" describes the trend of video recording instruction and making it available outside the classroom, Cisco touted its solution as a more complete approach that it calls "education capture."

Cisco Lecture Vision enables educators to capture live and recorded lectures in high definition and make them accessible to students anywhere, anytime, on any device, including PCs, smart phones, and tablets. The solution supports branding, media editing, resource libraries, and teacher-student collaboration on live and recorded media using social commenting, rating, and word tagging. Lecture Vision also supports integration with Cisco Pulse, a video product that enables users to search videos based on what's spoken and who's speaking.

Key components and features of Lecture Vision include:

• Support for any video camera as an input device (using a Cisco encoder);
• Cisco Telepresence Content Server for recording, streaming, and editing videos before publishing to the Cisco Show and Share application;
• Cisco Media Experience Engine (MXE) 3500, which enables users to transcode any type of video into multiple formats, customize it with post-production features such as trailers and bumpers, and share it live or on-demand on any other device;
• Digital displays, so videos can be streamed to or prepositioned on Cisco Digital Signs, Cisco TelePresence systems, desktops, mobile devices, or interactive whiteboards;
• Integrated Cisco Pulse Video Analytics, which enables users to search by speaker or keyword to identify and navigate to the most relevant video segments;
• Cisco WebEx and Cisco TelePresence, which enable immersive teaching and learning from any location on any device and can transform any classroom display, projector, or whiteboard into a 1080p HD meeting space; and
• Cisco medianet technology, which is a Cisco architectural playbook and best practices guide for a video-ready network infrastructure that provides the foundation for introducing video traffic over a converged network.

"Video captures attention in a way that the printed page does not, for communications and learning," said Joseph Deck, chief technology officer, Our Lady of the Lakes University. Walk around a campus today, and you'll see students viewing videos on their smart phones. 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."

Further information about Cisco Lecture Capture can be found on the Cisco site.