Purdue has been capturing lectures for over 35 years. Historically, lectures were recorded to a central recording studio on to reel to reel (audio cassette in 1999) and delivered to the Library for listening. These recordings were not allowed outside of the library. Students were allowed to bring on their own cassette tape in 1999 and take a copy of the lecture with them.
An MP3 based system was installed in January 2005. This system included multiple digital recorders, many flash drives, and custom built software to manage the uploading of content to web and streaming servers.
This is Boilercast! Well, Mike this is the guy who has been behind the curtain hitting record every hour for the past four years. Obviously this model didn’t scale. We like Mike but he wanted more to do and we wanted to become more efficient. Our investigation for a replacement system began.
Three things were important to us. First, was scalability. Whatever solution we chose had to scale to all of our classrooms. Secondly, the system had to be secure. Purdue takes pride in the security of their systems and we thoroughly test each application that is installed in our production environment. And obviously cost. Cost is always a factor when you are talking about a system this size.
After an extensive review, we obviously chose Echo 360 as our solution.