With the advent of online video, audio, and podcasts, students are arriving at institutions of higher education with increasingly higher expectations for online access to rich media coursework and other university-related content.

However, implementing a rich media strategy that fulfills the needs of wide arrays of user groups across an institution is challenging.  Institutions must address how to control access to copyrighted content and manage digital media licenses; how to effectively incorporate rich media into students' familiar teaching and learning systems; how to establish a scalable rich media service that does not create a workflow burden for staff; and many other significant issues.

ShareStream, which was developed in collaboration with Georgetown University at its Sun Center of Excellence in Scholarly Information Architecture, is designed specifically to fulfill the requirements of educational institutions, and to address the challenges educational institutions face with their rich media projects.

“Pick and Play” Course Media Page that provides faculty and students with a single hub for course media, and a sleek and intuitive web destination for playing, browsing, and searching for the media they have privileges for directly within your institution’s learning management system.

Interoperability with Learning Management Systems through ShareStream’s Blackboard Building Block and integration point with Sakai, Moodle, eCollege, and other learning management systems

Easy Ingest for faculty members and students with no rich media expertise that allows authorized users to upload media, which is then automatically transcoded to the appropriate end formats

Digitize, Transcode, and Batch Migrate large multimedia collections in an automated fashion

Edit media through ShareStream’s online video-editing tool, which provides time-based editing, clip trimming, overlays, and other capabilities

Workflow and Business Process Management for staging the process of publishing media that includes compliance reviews and approvals

Store and manage media collections in an enterprise-wide asset management system optimized for large rich media files

Personal Media Gallery and Media Dropbox for submitting student generated content or sharing content with other students enrolled in the course

Preserve valuable content through ShareStream’s encoding methodology, which creates eMaster files to ensure that assets can be converted to future standard formats

Search and efficiently browse for and identify relevant learning objects via metadata-driven advanced search

Higher Education-specific Digital Rights Management that allows institutions to secure and control access to content, as well as manage digital media licenses

Deliver Media through On-demand Streaming, Live Streaming, and Streaming to Mobile Devices

Automatic Bandwidth-Detection and Adaptive Streaming Functionality for media delivery to users with wide ranges of Internet connectivity

Deep Embed Thumbnails to multiple locations, including websites, applications, and even emails, in a secure, password-protected manner or in an open environment, through ShareStream’s deep-embedding functionality

Podcasts into iTunes and RSS feeds in both an authenticated and open environment

Create educational videos synchronized with slides and tablet activity with ShareStream’s Course Producer module

Open API for Independent Third Party Integration

Integration with Authentication and Authorization Services and Single Sign-on Solutions

Reporting tool that audits and monitors user and content accesses

 

Implementation of the ShareStream platform allows instructional technologists and media specialists to:

• Provide faculty and staff with an easy-to-use mechanism for uploading media and creating clips that can be assigned to courses in Blackboard Learn and other LMSs
• Seamlessly incorporate secure streaming, downloads, and podcasts into online course delivery to create a more engaging e-Learning experience through ShareStream’s Blackboard Building Block and integration point with other LMSs
• Control access to content via higher education-specific rights management (DRM)
• Better serve traditional students by providing anytime/anywhere access to rich media coursework and other university-related media
• Consolidate multiple, support-intensive "silos" of rich media content into a scalable, enterprise-wide system optimized for large rich media files to achieve economies of scale.