Echo360 Webcast Planned

Echo360 (formerly Anystream) will host a live webcast on 7 November 2007 at 1 PM Eastern Time (check for local times). During the session, Echo360 Inc's Senior Vice President and GM Mark Jones will discuss presentation recording with Tracy Chapman,
Executive Director for eLearning and Technology for the School of Pharmacy and Health Professions at Creighton University.

Creighton has used Echo360 presentation recording solutions as part of its web-based distance learning program, through which students can obtain a Doctor of Pharmacy degree. The program is accredited by the American Council on Pharmacy Education.

The webcast is powered by Webex. If the time does not suit, you should be able to review the webcast after the live transmission. Please register.

Improving Grades and Reducing Dropouts

A study at Coppin State Univeristy in Maryland concluded that presentation recording technology which allows students to view lectures online after the class session can raise course retention rates (reducing dropouts) and improve grades.

This study result is described in an article in Campus Technology Magazine. The study is based on a single classroom deployment of Tegrity, one of the Echo360 competitors. The methodology used was to compare retention and test scores for two cohorts of students taking the same Psychology course material in the same semester from the same instructor, but only one class had recorded lessons available for review. In the study, retention rates increased from 71% to 83% with classes using Tegrity.

As observed in other similar studies, classroom attendance in courses where recorded lessons were available either stayed the same or increased. The most popular time to view recorded lectures? 2am!

Virtualisation of Display Graphics

Apreso can potentially capitalise on the technology trend towards virtualisation of display graphics. This virtualisation is being driven by VNC products such as RealVNC and Glance.

What's VNC? Well, a good definition is provided by Robin Good (no pun intended): "VNC is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures."

Whereas a display connection used to be a hard-wired analog link between a computer and a monitor, it is now possible to transmit display graphics digitally (using DVI and DisplayPort) and wirelessly over a LAN. Indeed, many modern projectors support wireless operation and a 'meeting mode' where learners can view the presenter's desktop.

The current Apreso product offering relies on either local screen capture or a hardware interface from UK-based Datapath. The Datapath Vision RGB Pro capture card converts analog VGA signals to a digital stream that Apreso converts to Flash. This works fine for desktop capture stations, but does not allow remote screen capture on laptops. One can use an external VGA-to-USB converter to interface a laptop, but the results were in my experience not acceptable (I used the Epiphan product, but did not try the Pro version).

Eventually, I found a solution that works. Using an inexpensive VNC software product known as Atelier Web Remote Commander, it is possible to monitor a remote screen over a wired or wireless LAN connection. The image quality is identical to what is seen by the presenter and the in-room audience (there is no analog conversion to VGA), and is thus superior to what can be captured using a Datapath card. Using AWRC, the remote desktop image can be enlarged to full screen view and then captured using Apreso's local screen recording capability. This works on laptops, making Apreso a mobile capture solution.

The problem with this approach is that the capture station operator is 'flying blind'. Because the remote image fills the local screen, the operator cannot check audio levels, video quality, or system status. It is likely that this issue can only be addressed with the next generation of video drivers that support display graphics. Today you can already use Windows Media encoder to capture the screen display, and minimise the encoder during processing. But it will take some time before 3rd party applications like Apreso can record a remote screen without simultaneously displaying it.

Incidentally, remote screen recording using anything but Datapath cards is not supported by Anystream. Hopefully the folks at Anystream will lobby Microsoft to provide more flexible VNC display drivers, and will provide alternatives for recording display graphics that do not rely exclusively on Datapath hardware.

Backgrounder on Anystream

Anystream makes the best presentation recording solution in the market today.

The company is based in Sterling Virginia, one of the most wealthy and high-tech communities in the US outside Silicon Valley. Anystream is a dynamic, and fast-growing company which specialises in encoding technology. Their core products are: Agility - a transcoding tool used by broadcasters, and Apreso - principally used by schools to recording classroom lectures.

Apreso is a software application that (with the correct hardware interfaces) allows recording of audio, video and synchronised display graphics. Unlike similar solutions from other vendors, there is no need to prepare materials in advance (eg- uploading of PowerPoint slides), and no post-production work. The recorded presentations are immediately available for viewing minutes after recording.

Anystream recently acquired Australian product Lectopia from the University of Western Australia, and will rebrand Apreso as Echo360 (thus the blog name).

According to published reports, the Echo360 brand was chosen "to convey the flexibility of on-demand lecture material for students while signifying the evolution of lecture capture into an important mainstay in higher education". This acquisition will also coincide with Anystream's education division spinning off as its own company, Echo360, Inc.

The product roadmap is still a bit unclear, but I understand from my recent visit to Anystream that the next software release will be version 2.0, and will build on the 1.x technology but with support for editing of recorded presentations and more scalable administration features. One key change is the shift to H.264 encoding for the presentation graphics. This is required to support editing (Flash being impossible to edit), but necesitates H.264 streaming support for delivery. One popular media server that streams H.264 is the free Darwin server from Apple.