Las Vegas, Nev. – EduComm Booth #34-37/InfoComm Booth #N627 – June 8, 2010 – Sonic Foundry, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the recognized market leader for rich media webcasting, lecture capture and knowledge management, today announced that New York Law School, one of the nation’s oldest independent law schools, has standardized on Mediasite for lecture capture and hosting.
New York Law School’s campus is evolving to meet the changing needs of its students with the opening of a new, state-of-the-art academic building last fall. The School’s expansion in Manhattan’s TriBeCa district went online with 16 Mediasite Recorders for recording lectures and other events, many of them in advanced rich media classrooms.
“I became aware of the power and potential of Sonic Foundry and Mediasite several years ago, during our research and review process for the new building. After looking at several vendors, it was Sonic Foundry’s backend that impressed us. It was not just that you could record all audio, video, and presentation content, but also the indexing and archiving process which, stood out,” said John Southard, CTO of New York Law School. “From day one Mediasite has simply worked.”
While the School initially planned to support the thousands of hours of captured presentations on an internal server, they found using Sonic Foundry’s managed hosting service was more time and cost effective.
“We chose the Mediasite hosting model because it scales quickly. Since the students and faculty viewing this content were for the most part off-campus, we saw no reason to move our content hosting in-house and burden our network infrastructure,” said Michael DeMeo, director of academic media services at New York Law School. “In the academic world, you have to work efficiently to handle the requirements of different centers on campus. It takes time, budget, hardware and planning to build an infrastructure. Mediasite has already done that work, and there are case studies proving that it’s working efficiently. It’s out of sight, out of mind; it’s just working. For live events in particular, it provides a piece of mind to know our Mediasite server is out there and running.”
Before the facility expansion, New York Law School had one Mediasite recorder that was used to record special events and e-learning lectures. Since the expansion, more than 3,000 presentations have been recorded, and New York Law School expects that number to scale in the next 12 months.
“We’re using Mediasite more than just for special events. We’ve integrated with the Blackboard learning management system and automatically aggregate captured lectures throughout the semester, which has been extremely helpful to faculty,” said DeMeo. “We do live webcasts of our events and conferences, but lecture capture with Mediasite remains our main focus.”
DeMeo also relies on Mediasite’s reporting tools, using the information gathered to refine the lecture capture program. “Our entire catalog is categorized by users and by platforms so we see how our student body is watching the content by producting statistics on platform, operating system and web browser usage. Those metrics are invaluable for discussions between the office of Information Technology and Academic Affairs. These statistics assist us in creating policies as they relate to our media platform.”
“Instead of spending resources to develop an internal media server infrastructure, New York Law School, like a growing number of schools, has chosen to put Mediasite hosting in the cloud. While they run and administer the application, Sonic Foundry provides a worry-free environment for them to rapidly scale under that managed service approach without losing a single feature by hosting offsite,” said Rimas Buinevicius, chairman and CEO of Sonic Foundry. “As user demand for hosted content continues to grow, we look forward to our role in establishing standards that enable universities to take advantage of this simpler management approach.”
About New York Law School
Founded in 1891, New York Law School is an independent law school located in lower Manhattan near the city’s centers of law, government, and finance. New York Law School’s renowned faculty of prolific scholars has built the School’s strength in such areas as constitutional law, civil and human rights, labor and employment law, media and information law, urban legal studies, international and comparative law, and a number of interdisciplinary fields. The School is noted for its nine academic centers: Center on Business Law & Policy, Center on Financial Services Law, Center for International Law, Center for New York City Law, Center for Professional Values and Practice, Center for Real Estate Studies, Diane Abbey Law Center for Children and Families, Institute for Information Law & Policy, and Justice Action Center. New York Law School has more than 13,000 graduates and enrolls some 1,500 students in its full- and part-time J.D. program and its four advanced degree programs in financial services law, real estate, tax, and mental disability law studies. www.nyls.edu
About Sonic Foundry®, Inc.
Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Madison, Wis., Sonic Foundry (OTC: SOFO) is dedicated to transforming how the world works and learns through innovative and scalable technology solutions. Sonic Foundry’s brands include Vidable® and Global Learning Exchange® which help unlock a smarter, more connected world for learners, workers, and entrepreneurs everywhere. For more information visit www.sonicfoundry.com.
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