Matching supply to demand. For instructors and students, it’s just another lesson in Economics 101. For the IT staff managing lecture capture for a growing institution, however, the phrase can conjure up nightmare visions of bottlenecks, student complaints and months and months of building up the infrastructure to handle the demand. By the time everything’s up and running, the institution and its needs have grown even more, and it’s time to expand again.

In the last year, students used Echo360 more than 16,600,000 times and watched almost 400 million minutes of instruction through our solution.   Those stunning numbers are made possible because of the system’s DNA.  From day 1, whether you are a small school or major research institution, capture must allow schools to expand and contract as needed.  In other words, it must scale.

Fortunately there are a few secrets that can help you quickly and painlessly scale lecture capture to your institution’s unique needs:

1. To keep traffic moving, get “SaaS-y”

It’s Software as a Service (SaaS) lecture capture—leave the worry of servers and infrastructure to Echo360—designed to grow with an organization’s needs and be ultra-elastic:  service expands or contracts based on usage. So you have a vast capacity on weeknights when students use the system most, and only a trickle on Sunday afternoons when they use it least. And you can easily bring new classrooms and buildings online as the popularity of your solution spreads. And Echo360 delivers its capture via Amazon Web Services, the platinum standard in capacity, reliability and disaster recovery—with a Scala/Play platform your developers will love.

2. Remember Peanut Butter and Jelly

Peanut butter without jelly is delicious, but together…they’re a classic partnership. The partner of technical scale is resource scale, or how to maximize the time of the people managing the system. Select a solution that frees your busy staff from having to think about infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. Your lecture capture provider should be like a landlord for an apartment building; your institution rents what it needs and never has to worry about things like utilities, the alarm system and keeping the HVAC going. In the world of lecture capture, this means your partner guarantees uptime and takes care of everything from upgrades to case tickets—they own these and take them off your plate.

3. 18 months or 48 hours?  It’s your call.

With project management, integration with other systems, deployment and training, DIY lecture capture can be an 18-month process—does your institution have time for that?

A scaled lecture capture solution should be easy to get started in just hours. If it’s Echo360, you’ll get help with support and deployment as well. Project managers help you get set up with a/v, training, and scheduling.  At the end, we include the details in a Project Completion document, so you can see what we’ve done and have that knowledge to guide your efforts into the future.

Check out the infographic on the numbers a scalable solution like Echo360 can handle each and every academic year.

 

By_the_Numbers


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