Customers – Education/Government

Federal and Local government entities as well as higher education institutions are quickly becoming leading adopters of video communications. Whether it is intended for collaboration on projects across multiple locations and vendor partners, or reaching faculty and student body - video usage has become and integral part of their communications in order to:

Scale to larger audiences
Enhance training
Provide immediate archives for video-on-demand viewing
Deliver video courses, live as well as on demand / archived classroom sessions
Centralize existing video asset management control
Provide faculty-to-faculty communications leveraging live video
Control access and track usage of who viewed what, where, and for how long

These are some leading Government and Education organizations using Qumu solutions today:

Lamar University is a Qumu customer who has achieved success in deploying video technologies to enhance the effectiveness of the education system in many ways.

Lamar University Case Study: Video Learning

The idea was simple…."Rather than having people sit in a room for four hours, we wanted to provide them the ability to log in at their desks." Kim Allen Director of Data, Voice, and Video Networking for Lamar University

The university settled on Qumu as a partner in this endeavor, tapping the company's ability to create and distribute video over existing infrastructure (like Lamar University's Cisco hardware).

Once e-learning got a foothold at Lamar, potential use cases multiplied. For example, the university used videotaped training to replace in-person training pertaining to changes in financial reporting. This way, instead of sending employees to Austin for seminars delivered by the state comptroller's office ("Having people away from their jobs," as Allen notes), Lamar University simply digitized presentations and delivered them to desktops.

Through Qumu, this video content remains auditable. That is, the technology reports on who has viewed what video content, and for how long. This is important because, in the case of Lamar University, training is often an issue of compliance, and compliance demands audits. For example, Lamar gets some of its funding from the State of Texas, hence its contact with the state comptroller's office. Now, even when Lamar employees don't go to Austin, the university can prove that key employees have watched and been trained on certain kinds of content.

While conceding that video and other forms of e-learning are much cheaper and more time-effective than traditional classroom environments, you might be worried that they are less interactive. That's not necessarily the case. "The software provides the ability for participants to ask questions during a live presentation," Allen says. "Also, the presenters can send out a survey."

Lamar's exposure to e-learning worked out so well that the university actively considered other ways of putting it to use. Not surprisingly, all kinds of possibilities dawned, particularly in the instructional sphere.

"In the past, instructors had been creating or utilizing VHS tapes as part of their classroom instruction," Allen recalls. "Because of our relationships with the regional education service center, someone got in a van and delivered those VHS tapes to the school district. We wanted to digitize that media." This is what Lamar University was able to do with Qumu, creating an easier way to get traditional distance learning content out to the local K-12 schools that Lamar occasionally serves with co-enrollment. This activity served as a kind of pilot for the next and most ambitious step of digitizing Lamar University's regular campus classes. "This is a way to increase our enrollment," believes Allen, who is enthusiastic about the possibilities of, for the first time, transcending the physical classroom using an Enterprise Video Communications System. "We will be able to further expand our student population outside our local area."

Lamar University was somewhat limited to its local area even in the existing distance learning paradigm because, as we've seen, even their video content had to be delivered by van. Qumu has given the university more flexibility with which to flesh out the distance learning proposition. "We can stream video live or video on demand," Allen explains. "We can also archive it on campus and allow departmental representatives the ability to publish their own video."

The on demand concept has always been central to the e-learning proposition because, in the end, it's about accommodating the learner's demand for choices. "Some people do better in the traditional classroom environment, and some people do better when they are provided the ability to participate in the educational process in their own time," Allen notes. "Some people are up at two o'clock in the morning and prefer to complete their assignments at that time."

Strategically, Lamar University envisions e-learning not as simply a delivery mechanism for distance learning or employee training but as a way of permanently embedding new media in classrooms. "We already have student groups defined in our on-campus authentication systems," Allen says. "They have classes listed and authentication trees are already created. We want them to have easy access to media when they log in to the portal product."

That means students won't have to compromise their behavior to take advantage of the new media. The existing portal and directory structure will remain in place, and video will show up as a contextual menu item in classes for which the students are enrolled.

"We've been testing the classroom piece of it," Allen concludes. "It's going to be huge."

Multimedia communications will continue to grow as a way for employees, customers, and partners to communicate and learn interactively

– Claire Schooley, Forrester