Tag Archives: echo360

Echo360 install. Choas theory in practice

By the time we wound our way through the procurement process and actually received our Echo360 appliance, I had about 3 weeks before classes started. In that time I had to do the following:

  • Registration of the appliance on network.
  • Physical install into lectern.
  • Connection and configuration of the existing AV system.
  • Camera installation and connection.
  • Training on Echo360 system.
  • Scheduling classes and recordings.
  • Integration with Sakai to allow single sign on and distribution
  • Testing.

Plenty of time!

Oh. Did I mention that I was also doing the exact same thing with a Mediasite system and the exact same deadline?

Cannonball_run

Turns out that while it was hectic, it all came together. No 80 hour weeks or anything either. Just busy. I had tremendous support and assistance from my colleagues that maintain the classroom AV systems in the learning spaces group as well as the team that manages the LMS.

For the pilot Echo360 is hosting everything for us. They take care of content distribution and they are responsible for the servers. If I had to do that as well, there’s no way I could have pulled this off.

  • Network registration is something that I’m pretty familiar with here at ND so that only took a few minutes.
  • Installation into the lectern was easy. I’m a former AV guy so I just start screwing stuff in and plugging it in. All the AV switching gear was there too so it was just a matter of adding a few cables. The biggest issue was getting the output of the sound system into the device. That required changes to be made to wiring and the Ashley processor which live in another closet. The AV guys handled that and it only took a few hours.
  • The AV programmer made a few changes to the Crestron DMPS-300 to ensure that when the projector was blanked, no content was being sent to the capture appliance.
  • Camera installation was handled by the AV guys and was just plugging in cables for me.
  • Training was pretty extensive and handled over the phone. While the UI isn’t anything to write home about, once you play with a little it becomes familiar enough. The concepts and workflow are at least easy to understand.
    • I create terms that set the start and end dates for the semester (Fall 2013, Spring 2014, etc.)
    • I create courses (Biology 10111, CSE 20111)
    • I create sections (FA14-Biology 10111)
    • I create a recording schedule for each section based on class times. (I set the start time 1 minute early and end 2 minutes after class.)
  • The LTI integration was pretty easy. Once I sat down with the Sakai admin we got my Echo implementation guy on the phone and we had one class set up in about 10 minutes. Subsequent classes take about 5 minutes.
  • I didn’t have a lot of time to do testing but the process has been very stable. Captures kick off as expected, content is uploaded and then gets encoded.

About 2 hours after class is over, students can view the recordings.

And about a week before the semester started they came out with new software (5.3) and I rolled the dice. I had them upgrade me to the newest version since there was no content and really nothing to lose. It went well and I had no issues. I’ll say it: I got lucky.

daft-punk-get-lucky-wallpaper-hd

I don’t have any experience with working in academia outside of Notre Dame but I’d say if I can do it here, surely it can be done anywhere.

Be not afraid my friends!

2 lecture capture systems enter, only one leaves!

After I did my evaluation of the Crestron CaptureHD and ruled it out as our primary capture device we started doing some evaluations of other products. There’s a lot of competition in this space. I’m lazy and I like to reinvent the wheel as little as possible. Fortunately we were able to piggyback on some of the great work that the Notre Dame executive education program had done about a year earlier. They had a Polycom/Accordent system that they had been running for years and was past due for replacement. They were also getting a beautiful new building and had some budget to work with. Those 2 things are a match made in heaven. Or Notre Dame. Or both.

They had whittled down the competitors to a fairly short list. Mediasite (Their eventual selection), Echo360 and Accordent. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we chose to re-evaluate their top two choices. Their use case is a little different than ours and enough time had passed that we couldn’t just pick their vendor and feel that we had done our job.

thunderdome

Does this mean that I am Tina Turner?

We wound up piloting hardware appliances from Echo360 and Mediasite. They’re in very similar classrooms that seat about 100 students. After evaluating a few cameras (a process which I will write up later), we chose the Vaddio HD-19. We chose the CCU version since it allowed for a very easy install. Simply run 3 Cat5 cables from the lectern where the capture appliance and switching gear live, back to where the camera will be placed. Mount the camera on the wall and plug it all in. It’s so easy that I did much of it myself. With the exception of the cable pulling. (I’m old and I wear nice pants to work. Sue me.)

Since the capture appliances are located in the lectern where the switching gear lives, all we needed to do was add a cable from the Crestron DMPS-300 to the capture device. The programmer had to do a little bit of programming to ensure that when the projector is blanked the capture device didn’t get content. This prevents a professor from seeing the blanked projector and then pulling up personal email or a gradebook on the PC and committing a FRPA violation. As I understand it, it only took him about an hour since he’s so talented. (One day he may read this and I’d like to stay on his good side.)

We already had Shure lapel microphones in these rooms but we had to get an output from the mixer into the capture devices. It had to be a combination of program and microphone audio so there was a little reconfiguration of the Ashley processors. One issue we have is that there’s no capability for picking up audience questions. We are considering adding a boundary or ceiling microphone to pick up these questions but it’s difficult to ensure that you don’t pick up ambient audio from HVAC systems and projector exhaust to say nothing of coughs and sneezes. It’s Indiana and roughly 6 months out of the year it’s cold and flu season.

And almost immediately after we started the pilot, we stopped calling it a pilot. Due to a combination of project management bureaucracy and our desire to keep expectations low, we started calling it a proof of concept. That was an infinitely more appropriate term since that’s really what we were doing. making sure the systems would integrate in our environment. Once we choose a vendor we’ll do an honest to goodness pilot and really try to build some demand.