Cloud Lecture Capture[1]

The Future for Lecture
Capture Solutions is in the
Cloud
Institutions will realize considerable value from on-
demand solutions
A Datamonitor whitepaper prepared for

Publication Date: January 2010

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The Future for Lecture Capture
Solutions is in the Cloud

ABOUT DATAMONITOR
Datamonitor plc is a premium business information company specializing in industry
analysis.

We help our clients, 5000 of the world‟s leading companies, to address complex
strategic issues.

Through our proprietary databases and wealth of expertise, we provide clients with
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Datamonitor maintains its headquarters in London and has regional offices in New
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The Future for Lecture Capture Solutions is in the Cloud
© Datamonitor (Published 01/2010) Page 2
This report is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied


THE FUTURE FOR LECTURE CAPTURE IS IN THE CLOUD

Higher education can no longer ignore the value of on-
demand

As other industries embraced cloud computing as a strategy for reducing costs and
improving services, higher education „waited in the wings,‟ arguing that colleges and
universities had unique characteristics which precluded the its adoption.

Figure 1: Advantages of the cloud and on-demand delivery model

Advantages
of SaaS/
Cloud
Computing

Reliability Increased
On-demand vendors offer
Functionality
24/7 support for hardware Cloud-delivered solutions are
and software glitches. They faster to deploy. These
are able to provide applications are also
redundancies in the network, configurable and easily
ensure minimal downtime scalable. On-demand
and provide round-the-clock vendors often provide more
monitoring of its data updates than they would for
centers. on-premise solutions.

Reduced Upfront Reduced IT Complexity Security
Costs On-demand vendors provide
Since a cloud-delivered solution is
There are no upfront costs hosted and managed by the vendor solutions through state-of-
associated with purchasing and deployed via the internet, there the-art secure data centers
software and infrastructure. is one less application in the which have multiple firewalls,
Cloud delivery uses a institutional IT landscape. This back-up procedures and
subscription-based, pay-as- frees up the IT staff to focus on redundancies to ensure no
you go pricing model. other systems or provide more data is lost or compromised.
services to end-users.

Source: Datamonitor DATAMONITOR



Yet recent financial events and the acceleration of long-emerging trends have
undermined the power of the argument against using an on-demand delivery model in
the higher education market. Institutions increasingly face the need to provide more
and higher quality services to students on budgets that are flat or even decreasing.
Cloud computing offers colleges and universities, of any size or type, a compelling
path out of this dilemma. In the following section, Datamonitor provides an overview
of how the cloud provides significant value by addressing key institutional pain points,
including:

 IT departments struggle to keep pace with escalating complexity;

 Students expect institutional services to have 24x7 availability;

 The cloud provides a compelling TCO proposition for institutions; and

 The pace of change for IT solutions is accelerating rapidly.

IT departments struggle to keep pace with escalating complexity

Over the last decade, the uptake of technology has surged in the higher education
market. Institutions are coming to realize that technology is a powerful tool for
customizing instruction to the needs of individual students and has the potential to
help educators overcome the challenges associated with effectively teaching a large
and diverse group of students. In addition, students increasingly expect technology to
support all facets of college life, from the classroom to the dorm room to the library
and back again. In order to recruit and retain the best students, institutions must
provide the latest technology solutions, which are increasingly becoming more
complex by the day. Institutional IT departments are stretched to the breaking point,
as they often do not have the relevant resources or expertise to maintain and support
these new applications effectively, let alone existing systems ones. With smaller
operating budgets and fewer opportunities to work with cutting-edge technology, t is
often difficult for institutions to hire skilled IT personnel. In addition, many colleges
and universities suffer from shortages in their centralized IT group due to skilled staff
leaving for higher paying jobs in the private business sector. Due to the personnel
challenges IT departments face, higher education institutions are increasingly
outsourcing their IT functions and accessing solutions through on-demand delivery
models. The software vendor‟s internal staff already has the expertise in the solution
and can provide institutions with knowledge and support that the institution‟s IT
department would be hard-pressed to match.



Students expect institutional services to have 24x7 availability

Not long ago were the days when dial-up, slow internet access, and low performance
rates were the norm. The internet has come a long way in the last decade. Today‟s
first-year student is well versed in technology, with no recollection of a world without
instant access to information. Students perceive technology more as an extension of
everyday life than as an innovation or premium service. Therefore, it is
understandable that students expect that when a computer is turned on, there will be
an instant wireless connection that enables them to read email, update their
Facebook profile, chat with a friend or professor on Instant Messenger or download
the latest course materials and lecture video. Students hold a fast-paced, „the world is
at your fingertips‟ mentality, and expect that their college or university will provide the
same technological resources. Therefore, it is imperative that institutions ensure that
their IT infrastructure and networks are „up and running‟ and accessible 24/7, 365
days a year. This round-the-clock reliability has become even more important as
institutions incorporate online and distant learning programs, in which students often
need access to the school‟s networks long after midnight. The cost associated with
maintaining a myriad of applications and IT services on a 24/7 basis, however, has
crept beyond the capacity and budgetary will of many institutions, driving them to
consider cloud-delivered solutions. Vendors providing on-demand solutions are often
better positioned to provide 24/7 support and ensure that the end users do not
experience any downtime by providing redundancies in the network and round-the-
clock monitoring of tier-one data centers. As students‟ expectations of instant access
to IT applications increases, as will expectations for institutional support services and
solution reliability. Since providing „five nines‟ or 99.999% reliability is outside of the
mission statement of most institutions, turning to cloud computing and hosted delivery
models for mission-critical applications makes sense.

Cloud computing provides a compelling TCO proposition for
institutions

At a time when the economy is reeling and institutions are cutting operational
budgets, the importance of managing and having visibility into the total cost of
ownership (TCO) of any solution becomes particularly acute. Many institutions do not
have the IT infrastructure or staff to support the addition of new applications, and so
implementing a new solution on-premise is often a huge and costly undertaking from
a resources perspective. An on-premise model entails purchasing hardware, software
and licenses up-front, as well as potentially hiring additional staff to maintain the
application, which would incur a large capital expense and strain on existing
operating budgets. In addition to these costs, institutions are often required to pay the
vendor for general support and software upgrades. Much of this is paid up-front



through a yearly contract, so institutions must play a guessing game in terms of how
many licenses to purchase and how much of the budget to allocate for system
support. On the other hand, cloud computing provides a lower and more visible TCO
to the institution, as it is not required to purchase anything up-front – no hardware,
software, licenses or support. Since cloud computing is sold as a service, the
institution pays the vendor on a monthly or annual subscription basis, typically
including 24/7 support, contractual levels of reliability and free software upgrades.
The cloud computing subscription model is much more predictable and easier for
institutions to allocate the appropriate funds.

The pace of change for IT solutions is accelerating rapidly

With technology vendors releasing new features and versions of their application
every few months, IT personnel managing applications on-premise can become
bogged down with staying current with the latest release or patch. In the event an
institution does not upgrade to a newer version, the technology provider will only offer
support for a few years. For most institutions, major upgrades are scheduled for the
summer and winter breaks, when there is minimal disruption to the end users.
Therefore, it can become cumbersome for IT staff to coordinate all maintenance
work, install new hardware and software, and ensure everything works as it should
before the fall and spring semesters begin. In the case of applications delivered
through the cloud, the technology provider is responsible for deploying patches and
upgrades to the application transparently. The updates are pre-tested and automatic,
so they eliminate the institution‟s need to wait for the IT department to schedule the
maintenance work and test the system before it is available to the end users. This is
most useful when vendors automatically download patches and provide software bug
fixes, often without the institution or the end users having any knowledge of the
problem in the first place. With a cloud-delivered application, an institution can remain
compliant with the latest software releases and provide its end users with the latest
technology without any additional headaches or risk to budgets and solution
performance.

The demands on education institutions are increasing and changing more rapidly
than ever before. As a result, the time to deploy new solutions, particularly those
focused on delivering services to students, should be measured in weeks and months
rather than years. Since adopting cloud-delivered applications does not require any
hardware and software installation on the institution-side, colleges and universities
are able to reduce significantly the time between signing a purchase order and
realizing value from the solution. Moreover, cloud-delivered solutions offer institutions
more flexibility than on-premise ones as they are better positioned to add or remove
services as needs change over time. For example, a department may be using a



lecture capture solution for the math department. As the value of this technology
spreads, deploying the solution to the chemistry and sociology courses is often simply
a matter of adding users through an online administrative interface providing
immediate access to faculty and students rather than waiting for the IT department to
install software and hardware. The increased functionality and flexibility that a cloud-
delivered application offers, such as faster deployment, ease in configurability,
scalability and freedom from maintenance and support, greatly lessens the burden on
the institution‟s IT department, allowing staff to focus on innovation and providing
training services to the end user rather than worrying about the IT infrastructure and
system performance.

All on-demand models are not created equal

Local. On-premise. On-site. In-house. Off-site. Outsource. Hosted. Managed
services. On-demand. SaaS. Cloud computing. These are just some of the common
terms used today when describing an IT solution‟s delivery model. Some of these
mean the same thing, but most do not. Problems arise, however, when vendors use
these various terms interchangeably to define their applications and services,
attempting to use the latest catch phrase and make their offerings seem cutting-edge.
However, all this has done is to confuse end users already struggling to make sense
of the sometimes nuanced differences of each delivery model. In addition, some
vendors have incorporated their own interpretations of what a delivery model should
be and redefined it completely to best suit their marketing strategy, adding fuel to the
fire of complexity. In this section, Datamonitor provides descriptions of the delivery
models that will be used throughout this report, hoping to reduce some of the
ambiguities and confusion that surround the terminology of alternative delivery
models.

On-premise versus outsourced and on-demand options
On-premise, on-site and in-house all refer to the same delivery model – the traditional
situation in which an application is implemented, managed, maintained and supported
locally at the institution. In the on-premise model, the institution is responsible for
purchasing and managing the infrastructure and hardware where the application and
data reside. In addition, the institution purchases the software and licenses, which it
owns, and is therefore in charge of supporting the users, implementing
customizations and upgrading the system when there are new releases. In many
cases, each computing device that will deploy the application must have an
installation of the software on it. In the on-premise model, the institution has full
control over the infrastructure and hardware, software, data, maintenance, support
and services provided to end users.



A myriad of factors is driving institutions to move away from the on-premise model
and consider outsourcing the implementation and on-going maintenance of their
applications. There are two primary models in this category: hosted and SaaS or
cloud delivery. Unfortunately, institutions and vendors often use these terms
interchangeably, even though there are important differences. First, the true meaning
of a hosted model is one in which the institution uses the technology provider‟s
infrastructure to run the application and store all the information, but must still
purchase the software and licenses as it would in the on-premise model. The
institution remains responsible for managing the application, while the technology
vendor provides maintenance services for the infrastructure. Institutions must pay
vendors a hosting fee for the use and management of the infrastructure. In addition to
hosting services, many vendors also provide managed services. In this case, the
software application is still bought by the institution, but the provider will manage the
application in terms of adding new users, installing patches and upgrades and
implementing customizations. Therefore, the institution‟s IT group is no longer
required to maintain either the hardware or the software for system stability, but will
need to provide support to its end users. Typically, most vendors use the term „hosted
services‟ when they are referring to a „managed services‟ offering, although a few do
differentiate between the two.

SaaS or cloud delivery is the latest delivery option, and one that is gaining traction
fast. In this model, the software application is delivered as an on-demand service to
the end user via the internet. Institutions are not required to purchase any additional
hardware, software, licenses or provide any internal IT services, nor is there a need
to install and run the application from a local computer. IT personnel are no longer
burdened with maintaining and supporting the infrastructure or software or worry
about system stability, and are able to better provide training services to end users,
increase adoption of the application and think of more innovative methods to use the
software. Applications delivered through SaaS are pay-as-you-go, most commonly as
a monthly or annual subscription plan, so expenses associated with the software are
more predictable. From the infrastructure standpoint, SaaS is delivered through a
multi-tenant architecture in which institutions are given a secure instance on a shared
server. This allows vendors to better manage and maintain each client‟s application,
thus providing enhanced customer service to the institution. This approach enables
vendors to manage the long-term development and support of their solutions in far
more elegant and efficient manner.



Lecture capture is well-positioned for on-demand delivery

Driven in large part by the demands of a student population addicted to YouTube and
the increasing ubiquity of online video, lecture capture solutions are rapidly being
adopted by colleges across the US and even internationally. In the next section,
Datamonitor will discuss how the benefits of using an on-demand delivery model are
especially compelling for lecture capture given its unique characteristics and the ways
in which it is used in higher education.

 Delivering instruction is no longer confined to the classroom;

 Students are taking a more active role in their own learning;

 Flexibility and scalability are key to supporting instruction; and

 Lecture capture is a rapidly evolving solution area.

Delivering instruction is no longer confined to the classroom

Faculty members are in constant motion; moving from committee meeting to
presenting at conferences, to conducting research in the field to delivering instruction,
which makes managing their schedules difficult at best and impossible at worst. Too
often, for example, they agonize about whether to cancel a class in order to present a
paper at a leading academic conference, even though these types of presentations
are central to their own career development and the prestige of the institution.
Lecture capture, however, offers faculty the ability to record their lecture in advance
of the missed class so that students are able to stay on track with the course. An on-
demand or cloud delivery model dramatically increases the power of this capability by
offering the ability to record lectures, in advance of the missed class, from wherever
and whenever it is most convenient for the professor, making it no longer necessary
to be physically on campus or even in the classroom. The best cloud-delivered
solutions empower faculty to capture and upload their lectures from their own laptops,
using a modest webcam and an internet connection, regardless if they are attending
a conference in Orlando or working from their home office in Newton. In the end, an
on-demand lecture capture solution allows professors to defy physics by being in two
places at once.

Students are taking a more active role in their own learning

In an era of hyper-connectivity and near real-time access to information, student
expectations and preferences for teaching and learning are changing rapidly. While
Datamonitor does not anticipate „bricks & mortar‟ lectures to disappear on college



campuses anytime soon, it does anticipate that students will take a more active role
in their own learning by utilizing technology and the experiences of their peers.
Collaboration will become an increasingly key component of the classroom, virtual or
„bricks and mortar‟, and influence how students create and develop their own
knowledge and skills. As a result, the tools that are used to complete group projects
are likely to expand and include new technologies such as lecture capture. There is
considerable value, for example, in allowing groups of students in a contracts
negotiation class to record their simulated negotiations and make them available to
others in the course. This approach not only offers the professor better insight into
the performance of the different teams and contribution of individual students, but the
unique opportunity to engage students in a discussion about the recorded
negotiations either in class or online. Yet, without a cloud delivery model, enabling
students to access the recording capabilities of a lecture capture solution would
require navigating a myriad of logistical hurdles, such as scheduling classroom space
during the evenings and weekends or installing software on student-owned laptops.
Few institutions have the necessary resources to clear these „hurdles‟ easily and
thus, are unlikely to extend lecture capture access to students. Therefore,
Datamonitor believes that cloud delivery enables institutions to realize added
instructional and student-learning value from investments in lecture capture.

Flexibility and scalability are key to supporting instruction

The expansion of lecture capture across a college or university often grows rapidly,
driven through the success of individual departments spreading through word of
mouth. Faculty will find news of colleagues in another department improving student
outcomes to be a powerful motivator for adopting lecture capture, particularly as the
solution provides demonstrable and easy to understand value without significant
behavioral change on their part. Consequently, many institutions find that shortly
after purchasing a lecture capture solution, faculty demand outpaces their ability to
install the necessary software and audiovisual equipment in classrooms. Further
exacerbating this challenge is that even when they are able to equip enough
classrooms, IT and AV departments struggle to secure and maintain these devices
after installing them across campus. A cloud delivered lecture capture solution,
however, sidesteps many of these issues by enabling the faculty to record lectures
with only their laptops and a few inexpensive peripherals that can be purchased from
any office supply store. Furthermore, as demand for access to the solution inevitably
grows, institutions can increase the number of courses with lecture capture
capabilities with a click of a mouse rather than with the generation of a work order to
physical plant. When resources are scarce and institutional IT budgets are flat or
even decreasing, the ability to make the implementation and on-going maintenance of



any solution more efficient through a cloud delivery-model provides considerable
institutional value.

Lecture capture is a rapidly evolving solution area

Lecture capture is a relatively new and emerging solution area, particularly in
comparison to old institutional stalwarts such as student information systems (SIS) or
even learning management solutions (LMS). Consequently, lecture capture vendors
are adding new capabilities and functionality on a far more regular basis than those
supporting other solution categories. In no way is this suggesting that SIS or LMS
vendors are not evolving their solutions, but the changes are likely to be more
incremental than those for lecture capture. Additionally, as lecture capture draws
from many of the technologies used in the rapidly changing digital media industry, the
propensity to introduce new and innovative functionality, such as advanced search, is
even higher for this solution area. Unfortunately, as the demands on IT departments
already far exceed existing resources of most institutions keeping up to date with the
releases of new software versions is an ongoing challenge. Consequently, providing
faculty and students with the most up-to-date version of a rapidly evolving lecture
capture solution is an uphill battle. As the vendor is responsible upgrading the
solution, a cloud delivery-model for lecture capture significantly reduces the burden of
managing the process for institutions and increases access for faculty and students to
more innovative capabilities.



Putting the cloud into action: Next steps for institutions

Investing in a lecture capture solution provides important educational value to
students by providing them with powerful tools and needed flexibility to improve their
academic performance. Utilizing an on-demand or cloud delivery model to support
lecture capture solutions will greatly enhance this value for not only students but
institutions as well. Yet, there is often considerable distance between identifying the
potential value from implementation a technology solution and realizing actual value
from it. Consequently, Datamonitor recommends that institutions make the following
considerations when selecting a lecture capture solutions:

 Discriminate between a simply hosted and a true cloud delivery;

 Ensure the future value of your IT investments; and

 Partner with vendors that balance innovation with usability.

Discriminate between a simply hosted and a true cloud delivery

Terms such as on-demand, hosted and SaaS and cloud are used indiscriminately in
the higher education market. While each of these terms shares the characteristic that
they are not an on-premise delivery model for software applications, the similarities
end largely there. As noted earlier in this paper, there are substantive differences
between true cloud delivery model and a hosted one in terms of how the software is
delivered and maintained. These differences affect the extent to which institutions
will be able to realize long-term value from their lecture capture solutions. Even
though all cloud delivered applications are purchased through a subscription model,
purchasing a solution on a subscription basis is not a guarantee that it will be
delivered through a true cloud model. Consequently, Datamonitor strongly advises
colleges and universities to do their „due diligence‟ with vendors to ensure that the
solution they are buying is truly delivered through a cloud model and not simply a
hosted one.

Ensure the future value of your IT investments

As institutional IT budgets come under heightened scrutiny, demonstrating the long-
term value of any investment and having clearly visibility into its total cost of
ownership (TCO) will be increasingly important. Now more than ever, few institutions
have the fiscal tolerance for replacing solutions that fail to keep pace with their
changing needs or continuing to support those whose cost of ongoing maintenance is
unpredictable or growing too rapidly. Datamonitor, therefore, encourages institutions



to safeguard the future value of their IT investments by considering the adoption of
cloud delivery model. Utilizing this model to deliver lecture capture solutions allows a
college or university to start small with its implementation without worrying about the
long-term capacity to expand usage or to have visibility into the cost of supporting
that expansion and avoid any unwanted budgetary surprises. Moreover, cloud
delivery diminishes many of the hurdles associated with upgrading to new software
versions and accessing more innovative features and functionality. In the end, cloud
computing offers higher education a valuable “insurance policy” on existing and future
IT investments.

Partner with vendors that balance innovation with usability

Institutions should seek out vendors that recognizing the importance of not
compromising usability for the sake of technical innovation. It is akin to the old
debate around a tree falling in the woods that no one hears: if a solution has the most
groundbreaking technology, but no one is able to use it, does it provide any value?
Datamonitor has found that the best vendors believe the answer to this question is no
and will often make significant investments in conducting end-user acceptance testing
and using customer advisory boards to drive or influence product development in
order to ensure that their solutions provide real and immediate value to their
customers. As lecture capture solutions are evolving rapidly and liable to draw from
more advanced technology in the media and consumer markets, it is particularly
important for institutions to partner with vendors that balance innovation with usability.
Choosing the right partner means that adopting a cutting-edge solutions doesn‟t
result in the faculty and staff cutting their teeth on its implementation.



APPENDIX

Abbreviations

CMS – Course Management System

LMS – Learning Management System

SaaS – Software-as-a-Service

SIS – Student Information System

TCO – Total Cost of Ownership

Ask the analyst

Nicole Engelbert

Practice Leader, Technology Industries

Ovum

E: nicole.engelbert@ovum.com


Cloud Lecture Capture[1]

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