An Introduction to ShareStream

Preservation and Archiving SeminarGeorge Washington University

September 24, 2009.

ShareStream Education ResourcesShareStream’s platform, a turnkey solution for educational institutions’ rich media needs, provides the means to digitize, archive, preserve, manage, and deliver rich media within LMS’s and other critical online learning destinations in a secure, auditable environment worldwide.

The Challenges On-Campus Students Face Today Accessing Rich Media

Content Accessibility Limitations•Content only viewable on-site during library hours•Subject to whether content has been checked out Student Expectations•Students have increasingly higher expectations for online access to rich media coursework and other university-related rich media

Multiple, Departmental-level Streaming-media Efforts•Not enterprise-class and scaleable•Multiple departmental “silos” of content; support intensive due to lack of consolidation•No easy mechanism for faculty to search and browse for rich media across silos to identify relevant assets for courses •No digital rights management (DRM) to safeguard and control access to content•No streamlined system for digitizing and managing large volumes of media

Universities and colleges provide access to films, language resource center content, music, lectures and recordings of visiting speakers primarily via “hard copies” stored in libraries and other physical locations, where only a finite number of copies are available.

There is a strong demand for a sophisticated platform that is not human-capital intensive.

There is a strong demand for a sophisticated platform that is not human-capital intensive.

Major Factors Impeding Online Distribution of Rich Media

No DRM Traditional higher education requires sophisticated, vertical-specific digital rights management (DRM) to comply with the legislative parameters for the legitimate use of copyrighted content for educational purposes.

No Interoperability Rich media system must be fully integrated with the university network and higher education’s scholarly systems to ensure that multimedia content is accessible wherever online teaching/learning and research occur (not just provide access through an external stand-alone application that delivers content outside of the familiar centralized context of the predominant eLearning environments).

No Turnkey Solution Higher education requires an enterprise-class, turnkey rich media platform to achieve maximum value from its licensed and institutionally-generated content (faces significant scalability bottlenecks and human-capital constraints without enterprise-class, full-lifecycle platform).

ShareStream Platform: Product Summary

ShareStream is a rich media management and delivery platform that allows educational institutions to store, manage, and preserve all of their licensed and institutionally-generated rich media content (video, audio, lectures, podcasts, images, etc.) in a centralized system and seamlessly deliver content globally into a variety of learning management systems (including Blackboard, Sakai, and eCollege,) running across university networks, while controllingcontent dissemination via higher education-specific digital rights management.

The ShareStream Solution for On-Campus Use

ShareStream fulfills a significant void in higher education for a rich media management and delivery platform that provides:

Protection of Digital Content Powerful higher-education-specific digital rights management that allows institutions to work within the legislative parameters and fulfill the requirements of content owners.

Complete Network Interoperability Full integration with the university network and interoperability with higher education’s scholarly systems, thereby ensuring that rich media is readily available in a secure, controlled environment wherever online teaching/learning and research take place.

A Turnkey Solution An end-to-end, full-lifecycle solution for the creation, management, and delivery of rich media that is highly scaleable for working with vast collections of content.

The ShareStream Solution for Traditional Institutions’ Distance Learning Programs

The ShareStream platform provides institutions of higher education with the technological tools specific to their workflow to allow them to operate as state-of-the-art educational media companies to achieve the maximum value from their content and brand beyond campus. Serves the roles of the University Multimedia Publisher for content aggregation and monetization through secure global distribution of institutionally-generated rich media. Allows traditional universities to “productize” their course-related rich media, not just provide access to lectures, through:

The Benefits of ShareStream for Fully-Online and Blended-Learning Students

The ShareStream platform allows higher education to cater to a whole new demographic of students, i.e., the professional learners.

For students carving out study time in between professional and familial responsibilities, ShareStream’s asynchronous, “on-demand” style of learning is ideal for adult learners’ lifestyles. Learn anytime, anywhere from any Web destination.

Podcasts to course-related media provide great value for the professional learner and the “student-on-the-go”.

The ShareStream Platform:Bridging the Technological Divide Between the Library and Teaching and Learning

Currently, academic computing is highly fragmented:

• The teams that manage library systems have very little interaction with the teams that run learning management systems for course-based learning.

• Administrative divide between the two groups the result of technological divide; no technology implemented that sits between the library and eLearning.

• Consequently, valuable content in library largely lingers and is not fully leveraged to enrich online course-based learning.

The ShareStream platform changes the equation for academic computing by facilitating greater fluidity between the library and teaching and learning.

The ShareStream platform bridges the technological and administrative divide between the library and teaching and learning by making the rich media housed in the library seamlessly available for course-based learning within LMSs and other eLearning applications, while controlling content dissemination through fine-grained digital rights management.

This allows academic computing to achieve significantly greater value from its content by seamlessly bringing rich media stored in the library into the teaching and learning domain to enrich online course-based learning.

The ShareStream Platform:Bridging the Technological Divide Between the Library and Teaching and Learning

Features & Benefits:Capture, Encode, and Archive (CEA)

Digitize large multimedia collections in an automated fashion

Archive media assets with the appropriate metadata

Preserve proprietary content and IP through ShareStream’s encoding methodology

Batch upload high volumes of rich media content in a streamlined manner to a variety of storage locations

Syndicate digitized content to storage locations in campuses across the globe

Digitize

Archive

Preserve

Batch upload

Syndicate

Store

Search

Control

Deliver

Integrate

Create

Author

Audit

Feature List

Features & Benefits:Rich Media Management and Delivery System

Store and manage media in an enterprise-wide asset-management system optimized for large rich media files

Search and efficiently browse for and identify relevant learning objects via metadata-driven advanced search

Control access to copyrighted content via higher education-specific rights management, access control, security, and identity management

Deliver online media globally via streaming, download within learning managements systems to users with wide-ranging levels of Internet connectivity

Integrate with universities' internal systems, including interoperability with learning management systems and integration with universities’ authentication and authorization and single sign-on technologies, all of which ensures that mission-critical content is available to students wherever they go online to learn

Create educational videos synchronized with slides and tablet activity with ShareStream’s Course Producer module

Author web 2.0 learning objects comprised of video, audio, podcasts, images, and segments from e-books in a template-based drag-and-drop fashion that faculty with minimal digital literary can create for courses

Audit all user and content accesses via a reporting tool that allows institutions to manage digital media licenses

Digitize

Archive

Preserve

Batch upload

Syndicate

Store

Search

Control

Deliver

Integrate

Create

Author

Audit

Feature List

The ShareStream Solution: Technical Architecture

ShareStream is benchmarked with Sun Hardware

Server Sun Fire T2000 Servers (Two ) or Sun 4500 (One)

Storage 5 TB

OS Linux

Server Sun Fire X4200 (Two ) or Sun Fire X4200 (One) and Sun 4500 (One)

Storage Sun 4500 or Sun StorageTek 5320

OS Linux

Server Sun Fire X4200 (Four )

Storage Sun StorageTek 6140/6540

OS Linux

Small Configuration: 50 Courses, 1,500 Students

Medium Configuration: 200 courses, 6,000 students

Large Configuration: 1,000 courses, 30,000 students