"The system is really pretty simple and pretty invisible to the instructor," says Mark Jones, Anystream’s vice president, education. "They don’t have to learn anything about our software."

How It Works

At present, there’s no Apreso-branded hardware to purchase when a customer buys into this rich media production system. However, Apreso customers are required to purchase or build a standard PC with a Windows operating system and commercial, off-the-shelf video capture cards. Jones said that by December of this year Apreso will be offering a "true appliance; think of it as a set-top box - a little tiny black box that is specifically designed for capturing classroom content."

With Apreso software installed and runing off the aforementioned standard PC, it becomes a "capture station," says Jones. "You run your feeds from your video camera and from whatever you are projecting from in the classroom for your visuals. Think of it as a VGA pigtail off of a podium. If you are presenting off of a laptop, we get a copy of that signal that goes to the LCD projector."

There’s also the back-end Apreso Content Manager software that runs and sits on the institution’s on-campus data center. "The Content Manager is really a rich media content server that lets you set configuration parameters and decide what you want to capture, where you want to publish it, schedule the actual captures, manage the rich media files - all of the things you would imagine that you would need to do to make this integrated with a campus environment," Jones explains.

Company Info

Anystream is based in Sterling, Virginia and has a history, starting in 2000, for providing high-end rich media automation solutions for major media companies such a CNN, MTV, Disney, Major League Baseball and ESPN. About two years ago Anystream expanded its initial vision to enable educators and trainers to create rich media content.

"We are a rich media, video engineering company by heritage," Jones adds. "We capture presentation materials in full motion. So, if you are annotating or browsing the web, or doing a software demonstration, we capture that in full motion and play it back, along with the video. So, technically, we have some nice advantages over other (rich media capturing products and services)."

Creighton University Adoption

One of Anystream’s newest customers is Creighton University in Omaha, Neb, which adopted Apreso for its distance-education, entry-level Doctor of Pharmacy degree program accredited by the American Council on Pharmaceutical Education. "The impact of our degree via distance program has been wildly successful and beneficial to a wide array of students. We even had a military reservist complete her courses from Iraq," notes Tracy Chapman, Creighton’s executive director for eLearning and technology for the School of Pharmacy and Health Professions.

Originally launched as a text-based distance program, Creighton added Apreso in 2006 in order to offer more on-demand, rich media versions of their courses. "We collected data to compare student performance after deploying Apreso," says Chapman. "From this evaluation we concluded that Apreso had a positive effect on both comprehension and student satisfaction. Contrary to current literature on the use of video for distance education courses, the pharmacy students almost unanimously indicated they want to see video of the instructor. Our students said they felt more connected to the course and instructor and that Apreso helped them maintain focus on the material being discussed."

The increasing demand for pharmacists as a result of the aging population has led to extraordinary growth in the demand for pharmacy education. To answer this need Creighton has increased their Doctor of Pharmacy enrollment by educating 55 new distance-learning students annually using Apreso.

Overall, "the faculty has embraced Apreso as an essential component to our distance-learning program because the technology is completely automated and unobtrusive," Chapman explains.

Pricing

According to Jones, Apreso has two pricing models. One is an annual leasing model starting at $5,000 per classroom. "It gets cheaper as you put in more classrooms," he says. "It gets discounted by 30 percent fairly quickly based on volume. You get a complete turnkey system from us for $5,000 per year." Under this pricing model the data itself resides on the campus and goes through Apreso’s server software. The other model allows users to have its content hosted on an Anystream server. However, "that is not really released yet," says Jones. "We are getting some demand for that, so we are in the process of vetting that out and releasing it. It is not a commercial offering yet. Most people prefer to have it on their campus once they get to a certain size because it becomes more cost effective that way."