Getting a Bigger Blend
In some classrooms, solutions are blended together to give faculty and students a better teaching, learning and communications experience. This is seen more often in cases of distance learning in colleges, where faculty and student are reliant on multiple combinations of solutions to teach and learn, respectively.
Scott Esser, senior director, regional sales GEM of Polycom, says this is the case with Skype for Business, which is an instant-messaging feature used with the Skype for Business Server; this replaced Windows Messenger, which ran on Microsoft Exchange Server.
Even though Skype for Business is a solution that is most utilized in the corporate world, Esser says colleges and universities are using it to improve ease of use while participating in distance learning, such as having a video call with an instructor. This solution blend, Esser says, also saves schools money, and enables users more opportunities to customize how they produce and consume content.
“Microsoft has made it so cost effective to deploy Skype for Business that we’re seeing customers requiring the integration with the Skype for Business with the Polycom solution, so we sort of glued that piece together,” Esser says. “When you look at recording and streaming, essentially we built a device that makes it super easy to record video conferencing sessions plus the content, build your personalized YouTube page for that department in a university.”
Within the combination of Polycom’s technologies with Skype for Business, instructors are able to keep tabs of students’ academic progress, especially with video solutions.
“We have a solution called Media Suite. We built a device that converts the video conferencing protocol to the different streaming formats, and then integrate it into a university’s active director or whatever they have, so that students can watch that content. It has a database that says which student watched what content and for how long…it’s relatively cost effective to get started with that particular solution for recording and streaming.”
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