"Our system is a combination of a local box talking to distance software," says Sean Brown, Sonic Foundry’s vice president, education. "This differs from other methods [for capturing audio, and video in sync with what the instructor features on his computer for one comprehensive online presentation] where the instructor has to load software onto his computer."

How It Works

Basically, the instructor simply plugs his PC, video camera and microphone into the Mediasite box, clicks record, and makes his presentation. The rest is accomplished automatically, with the end result being a fully online rich-media presentation archived on the institution’s server or on a Sonic Foundry-hosted server.

See the Repository Website

Many of these presentations are also being posted on a Mediasite repository-like website where the company’s customers voluntarily post, for free public viewing, the rich media presentations they have produced (see related link at end of this article). A recent navigation through this website, for instance, revealed a growing number of interesting rich media presentations within a special section on distance learning that featured a variety of titles, including "Multimedia in Your Blackboard Site," "Building Performance Assessment Rubrics," "Teaching Philosophy," "Electronic Portfolios," and "Introduction to Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning."

Company Info

Mediasite parent company Sonic Foundry (NASDAQ: SOFO) has been around since 1991 when it launched desktop media publishing products such as Vegas ® software. In 2001 Sonic Foundry acquired Mediasite from Carnegie Mellon, and in 2003 Sony Pictures Digital, which oversees the digital production and online assets of Sony Pictures Entertainment, acquired all of Sonic Foundry’s desktop software products and related assets for $19 million cash.

In many ways Mediasite was designed for fully online learning departments that want to manage their own rich media production services, although it is being used in a wide variety of other settings, including blended learning (where seat time is reduced in a traditional course) and in technology enhanced teaching and learning environments.

A recent article inside Innovate outlined how Duquesne University’s Journalism and Multimedia Arts department used Mediasite in two graduate courses taught face-to-face, Multimedia and Instructional Design and An Introduction to Human Computer Interaction. In short, authors Bill Gibbs, associate professor, and Erik Larson, technical course developer, noted that the system required "minimal technical expertise from instructors." The archived broadcasts created for these courses were well received by students. They helped them to manage their learning in a more productive fashion because the broadcasts allowed them to "control the sequence of the instruction, decide the content to be studied, and review content when needed," which was "essential to mastering the techniques taught in these two classes." In particular, both courses required students to take excessive notes to get an understanding of complex computing operations that were demonstrated in class. Having these classes archived and available for viewing at their convenience online at a later time allowed students to focus more on classroom activities without having to write everything down.¹

Pricing

The key components to a Mediasite system are the recorders for content capture, and the server software or Managed Service Hosting for content storage and delivery. The price of a single Mediasite recorder is $22,250 or $24,950, depending on the model (built-in model or mobile model respectively). The Mediasite Rich Media Server software for hosting your own content has a base license price of $7,950. The option to outsource the content storage and delivery of the output of your recorder to the Sonic Foundry Mediasite Managed Services location in cyberspace starts at $10,500 per semester. There are special education pricing packages and volume bundles available for all Mediasite products and services for qualifying institutions.

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