Rich Media Initiatives in Higher Education: Bridging the Divide Between Library and Teaching and Learning Systems

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 management and delivery platform 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, how to effectively incorporate rich media into students' familiar online-learning environments, how to bridge the divide between library systems and teaching-and-learning applications, and how to establish a scaleable digital media service that does not create a workflow burden for staff or require significant additional investment in human capital.

Join Sun, ShareStream, and guest speaker Charles Leonhardt from Georgetown University for a discussion of best practices and essential functionally for Rich Media Initiatives in Higher Education. Mr. Leonhardt, Georgetown’s Principal Technologist, serves as the university’s strategic lead for its rich media initiative. Through a discussion of ShareStream, Mr. Leonhardt will share his experiences with successfully implementing an institution-wide rich media platform that currently serves over 400 courses, delivering over 250,000 on-demand requests for content last semester.

During this webinar, Mr. Leonhardt will cover the following topics:

• Digitizing large multimedia collections in an automated fashion;
• Consolidating multiple "silos" of rich media content into an enterprise-wide repository optimized for storing and managing large rich media files;
• Controlling access to copyrighted content via higher-education-specific DRM access control, security, and identity management;
• Delivering online media globally via streaming, downloads and podcasts
• Integrating with a rich media platform with universities' library systems, learning management systems, and authentication-and-authorization systems, all of which ensures that mission-critical content is available to students wherever they go online to learn;
• Auditing all user and content accesses via a reporting tool that allows institutions to manage digital-media licenses and monitor usage trends.