Lecture Capture | News

U Florida Deploys Desktop Media Capture Campuswide

• By Leila Meyer
• 10/23/13

The university has been using Mediasite from Sonic Foundry since 2004. Mediasite is an enterprise video platform for creating, managing, and delivering video. The university used it to record events in lecture halls, classrooms, and at special events, making those videos available to students live and on-demand on their computers and mobile devices.

UF has now expanded its implementation of Mediasite on campus. The university started implementing Sonic Foundry's desktop capture and video upload tool, My Mediasite, in its classrooms this semester and plans to provide the tool to hundreds of people on campus. My Mediasite enables users to record, upload, manage, and publish videos created with their laptop's built-in camera. Faculty, staff, and students at the university will be able to use the tool to create and share videos, lectures, and assignments from anywhere. Once their videos are uploaded, the content is searchable, secure, and organized in one place.

According to Brian Smith, IT specialist at UF, the Web-based My Mediasite app is easy to use, even for the university's "most tech-challenged staff." My Mediasite uses optical character recognition to index slide text in presentations automatically, so students can search by keyword to find the information they're looking for. My Mediasite also provides analytics, so faculty can keep track of which students are watching their lectures.

“Before Mediasite, our students watched lectures. Now, they experience lectures,” said Smith in a prepared statement. “Mediasite’s ability to clearly display content by separating it from video in a rich media format is one of the innovative features that have helped to improve academic video on our campus.”

The University of Florida is a public, comprehensive, research university located in Gainesville, FL and serves nearly 50,000 students.