New Partnership for eLearning Thought Leaders Webinar Series

I posted a Media Review for TMR of the Mediasite web casting product in 2007. Recently, John Pollard and Kristin Zurovitch, Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite Product Marketing Manager, paid me an office visit to demo and to update me on changes to the system.

Mediasite, by Sonic Foundry, is a hardware and software package that creates web casts. Think university or corporate training department audio visual hardware tool that web casts instructor lectures –on-demand or recorded. Combine the Mediasite Recorder with Sonic Foundry’s online hosted content management offerings and you have a distance education portal. See me below giving my “Enabling Collaboration with Experts” talk at the recent University of Wisconsin Distance Teaching and Learning conference on August 5, 2010.

Mediasite has always relied on Microsoft software and the recent emergence of Silver Light has enabled Mediasite to drastically improve the “look and feel” of the skins. On Sonic Foundry’s Resource Library you can see how academic institutions and corporations are using this hardware to rapidly produce content.

I am poised to write another positive (and biased) review of Mediasite for TMR.

Here is a sneak preview of what I like and don’t like about this product:

Like:

1. The elegance of the capture appliance and software look and feel
2. The very hip employees at Sonic Foundry
3. The workflow from capture to publish to tracking learner attendance
4. The ability to save out presentations to other formats
5. The quality of the output
6. The SAAS-based learning management portal for tracking and record keeping
7. The continuous innovation: see the recorder control center

Dislike:

1. The price tag as compared to software solutions
2. Promotion of PowerPoint as an instructor’s crutch
3. Reliance on Microsoft software. I like Adobe Flash; who uses Silver Light?