Browser-based solution provides multi-platform access for instructors to edit lectures

(DULLES, Va .  – September 11, 2008 ) - Echo³⁶⁰, higher education’s first choice for allowing students to relive the classroom experience on demand, today announced product enhancements to the EchoSystem platform that fuel the adoption of lecture capture across an entire university. Foremost is a web-based editor that gives instructors the option to quickly tailor their rich media lectures.

The web-based EchoSystem editor requires no software installation on the part of faculty – providing ubiquitous access to edit and publish lectures without assistance from technology staff. Users simply select content from their lecture library and trim content as needed. Master lecture files are preserved so faculty can rollback to the original presentation at any time. As an integrated piece of the EchoSystem platform, a single edit can be universally applied to EchoSystem podcasts, vodcasts and rich media lectures

Also new to the EchoSystem are feature enhancements that address the needs of system and campus administrators as they scale to campus-wide deployments:

• Campus-wide Confidence Monitoring: Centralized monitoring of the capture process - including the status of audio, video and VGA feeds - gives administrators real-time health of capture operations across campus.
• Enhanced Usage Reporting: CIO’s, provosts, deans and faculty can track most popular lectures and spikes in system usage, providing valuable insight into student usage patterns.
• Increased Content Security: Using LDAP/Active Directory system integration, lecture access can be limited to authenticated users, preventing viewing of links forwarded to students not enrolled in a particular class.

This announcement comes on the heels of the June delivery of the EchoSystem platform.  “Echo³⁶⁰ continues to eliminate the obstacles universities face when scaling lecture capture to more than just a few classrooms.  First we delivered the EchoSystem, an enterprise-class solution for automating the scheduling, production and publishing of rich media lectures and podcasts campus wide.  We reduced the total cost of ownership with the introduction of site licensing and the EchoSystem capture appliance,” said Mark Jones, president of Echo³⁶⁰.  “And staying true to our philosophy, our new features like web-based editing and proactive confidence monitoring are designed to facilitate broad deployments without taxing faculty or staff.”

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About Echo³⁶⁰

Echo³⁶⁰ envisions an opportunity for every student to be freed from traditional barriers to learning with an on-demand education experience.  Full-time, part-time, distance, continuing, and online all describe today’s student living in a 24/7 world.  On-demand media and education converge at the newly-formed  Echo³⁶⁰, helping colleges and universities engage students on the students’ terms with full and unbounded access to classroom-based content via multiplatform replay.  Developed in partnership with the University of Western Australia, Echo³⁶⁰ means scalable and affordable lecture capture solutions that can provide institutions of all sizes with universal availability of lecture content. For more information, log on to www.echo360.com.