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University of Maryland A. James Clark School of Engineering Drives Double Digit Enrollment Increases for Remote Students through Online Learning via M

Posted on Wednesday, June 13, 2012

New Deployment at Siegel Learning Center adds high definition lecture capture, increases access to graduate program

Las Vegas, Nev., InfoComm Booth #C9141 — June 13, 2012 — Sonic Foundry, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the trusted market leader for lecture capture, enterprise and event webcasting, today announced the University of Maryland A. James Clark School of Engineering has selected Mediasite for lecture capture in its new multi-million dollar state-of-the-art online learning facility. The school is ranked 9th in the nation among public undergraduate engineering programs, according to U.S. News and World Report.

The Siegel Learning Center, a 6,000-square-foot facility housed inside the school’s J.M. Patterson building, is the new hub for online learning on campus, scheduled to open for classes this fall. The center will have six high definition studio classrooms that will use Mediasite as its core educational technology platform to deliver lectures to about 1,000 online students, primarily graduate level, each semester. Another roughly 1,000 on-campus students also access the Mediasite webcasts each semester on-demand to review what they learned in class.

The Distance Education Technology and Services (DETS), part of the Engineering Information Technology group on campus, provides services to all disciplines within the School of Engineering and other entities on campus. DETS has been using Mediasite for five years in classrooms across the campus. Due to the highly technical content of the engineering courses, the department wanted to begin live streaming courses in high definition so that in-depth annotations made by professors would be crystal clear to those watching the webcasts. The department also wanted a centralized facility for lecture capture at the school and it chose to continue its long-standing partnership with Sonic Foundry, adding ML HD Recorders to every classroom which will run on Mediasite 6, allowing students to watch lectures live and on-demand from their mobile devices.

“For DETS, Mediasite allows us to easily deliver classes to students who aren’t able to physically be on campus. The distance learning students are given the same opportunities as students in the traditional classroom. With Mediasite, the school can enroll hundreds of additional students online without the need to add additional faculty and/or staff, which saves us money,” said Adam Kelley, IT engineer for DETS.

“We’ve been using Mediasite for five years, and for five years straight we’ve had double digit enrollment increases. I completely credit that to having the course materials available online via Mediasite webcasts,” said Marty Ronning, assistant director of DETS. “I have walked down hallways around studios when classes let out and listen to students saying ‘I love taking classes in these rooms because I can always watch lectures again.’ For the highly technical engineering courses where students are watching their professors hand-draw figures and do calculations via Mediasite, having the ability to stream in high definition is of paramount importance.”

The school of engineering is located on the College Park campus of the University of Maryland and records about 100 engineering classes each year with Mediasite. It also uses Mediasite to live stream special events on campus such as distinguished lecture series, special speakers and commencement ceremonies for family members and friends who can’t travel to campus.

“A. James Clark School of Engineering’s enterprise installation of Mediasite at the University of Maryland is an excellent example of the ever-growing demand for live and high definition lecture capture technology. In 21st century education students aren’t just learning in classrooms, face-to-face with their instructors. Mediasite allows students, regardless of time and distance, to receive a high-quality education when and where it’s convenient for them,” said Gary Weis, chief executive officer for Sonic Foundry. “We’re honored that the University of Maryland continues to place its trust in Mediasite as the educational technology platform on which to build their cutting-edge online learning programs.”

Trusted by more than 1000 colleges and universities, the patented Mediasite webcasting and video content management system quickly and cost-effectively automates the capture, management, delivery and search of live and on-demand streaming videos and rich media presentations that combine video with slides.

About Sonic Foundry®, Inc.

Sonic Foundry (NASDAQ: SOFO, www.sonicfoundry.com) is the trusted market leader for enterprise webcasting and lecture capture, providing video communication solutions for education, business and government. Powered by the patented Mediasite webcasting platform and Mediasite Events group, the company empowers people to transform the way they communicate online, using video webcasts to bridge time and distance, accelerate research and improve performance. Product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of Sonic Foundry, Inc. or their respective owners.

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