An Introduction to ShareStream
Preservation and Archiving Seminar
George Washington University
September 24, 2009.
ShareStream Education Resources
ShareStream’s platform, a turnkey solution for
educational institutions’ rich media needs,
provides the means to digitize, archive,
preserve, manage, and deliver rich media
within LMS’s and other critical online
learning destinations in a secure,
auditable environment worldwide.
The Challenges On-Campus Students
Face Today Accessing Rich Media
Universities and colleges provide access to films, language resource center content, music,
lectures and recordings of visiting speakers primarily via “hard copies” stored in libraries and
other physical locations, where only a finite number of copies are available.
Content Accessibility Limitations
• Content only viewable on-site during library hours
• Subject to whether content has been checked out
Student Expectations
• Students have increasingly higher expectations for online access to rich media coursework and
other university-related rich media
Multiple, Departmental-level Streaming-media Efforts
• Not enterprise-class and scaleable
• Multiple departmental “silos” of content; support intensive due to lack of consolidation
• No easy mechanism for faculty to search and browse for rich media across silos to identify
relevant assets for courses
• No digital rights management (DRM) to safeguard and control access to content
• No streamlined system for digitizing and managing large volumes of media
There is a strong demand for a sophisticated platform
that is not human-capital intensive.
Major Factors Impeding
Online Distribution of Rich Media
No DRM Traditional higher education requires sophisticated, verticalspecific digital rights management (DRM) to comply with the legislative
parameters for the legitimate use of copyrighted content for educational
purposes.
No Interoperability Rich media system must be fully integrated with the
university network and higher education’s scholarly systems to ensure that
multimedia content is accessible wherever online teaching/learning and
research occur (not just provide access through an external stand-alone
application that delivers content outside of the familiar centralized context
of the predominant eLearning environments).
No Turnkey Solution Higher education requires an enterprise-class,
turnkey rich media platform to achieve maximum value from its licensed
and institutionally-generated content (faces significant scalability
bottlenecks and human-capital constraints without enterprise-class, fulllifecycle platform).
ShareStream Platform: Product Summary
ShareStream is a rich media management and delivery platform that allows educational
institutions to store, manage, and preserve all of their licensed and institutionally-generated
rich media content (video, audio, lectures, podcasts, images, etc.) in a centralized system and
seamlessly deliver content globally into a variety of learning management systems (including
Blackboard, Sakai, and eCollege,) running across university networks, while controlling
content dissemination via higher education-specific digital rights management.
The ShareStream Solution for On-Campus Use
ShareStream fulfills a significant void in higher education for a rich media management
and delivery platform that provides:
Protection of Digital Content Powerful higher-education-specific digital
rights management that allows institutions to work within the legislative
parameters and fulfill the requirements of content owners.
Complete Network Interoperability Full integration with the university
network and interoperability with higher education’s scholarly systems,
thereby ensuring that rich media is readily available in a secure, controlled
environment wherever online teaching/learning and research take place.
A Turnkey Solution An end-to-end, full-lifecycle solution for the creation,
management, and delivery of rich media that is highly scaleable for working
with vast collections of content.
The ShareStream Solution for
Traditional Institutions’ Distance Learning Programs
The ShareStream platform provides institutions of higher education with the
technological tools specific to their workflow to allow them to operate as
state-of-the-art educational media companies to achieve the maximum value
from their content and brand beyond campus.
Serves the roles of the University Multimedia Publisher for content aggregation
and monetization through secure global distribution of institutionally-generated
rich media.
Allows traditional universities to “productize” their course-related rich media, not just
provide access to lectures, through:
• Course-Development Tools
• DRM (Digital Rights Management)
• Video Editing
• Author Web 2.0 Learning Objects
with Video, Audio, Podcasts, Images
and e-Books
• Clip-Creation
The Benefits of ShareStream for
Fully-Online and Blended-Learning Students
The ShareStream platform allows higher education to cater to a whole new demographic of
students, i.e., the professional learners.
For students carving out study time in between professional
and familial responsibilities, ShareStream’s
asynchronous, “on-demand” style of learning is
ideal for adult learners’ lifestyles. Learn anytime,
anywhere from any Web destination.
Podcasts to course-related media provide great
value for the professional learner and the
“student-on-the-go”.
The ShareStream Platform:
Bridging the Technological Divide Between the Library and Teaching and Learning
Currently, academic computing is highly fragmented:
• The teams that manage library systems have very little interaction with the
teams that run learning management systems for course-based learning.
• Administrative divide between the two groups the result of technological
divide; no technology implemented that sits between the library and eLearning.
• Consequently, valuable content in library largely lingers and is not fully
leveraged to enrich online course-based learning.
Library
Systems
Teaching
and
Learning
Systems
The ShareStream Platform:
Bridging the Technological Divide Between the Library and Teaching and Learning
The ShareStream platform changes the equation for academic computing by facilitating
greater fluidity between the library and teaching and learning.
The ShareStream platform bridges the technological and administrative divide between
the library and teaching and learning by making the rich media housed in the library
seamlessly available for course-based learning within LMSs and other eLearning
applications, while controlling content dissemination through fine-grained digital rights
management.
This allows academic computing to
achieve significantly greater value from
its content by seamlessly bringing rich
media stored in the library into the
teaching and learning domain to enrich
online course-based learning.
The ShareStream Platform
Library
Systems
Teaching
and
Learning
Systems
Feature List
Features & Benefits:
Capture, Encode, and Archive (CEA)
Digitize
Archive
Preserve
Batch upload
Syndicate
Store
Search
Control
Deliver
Integrate
Create
Author
Audit
Digitize large multimedia collections in an automated fashion
Archive media assets with the appropriate metadata
Preserve proprietary content and IP through ShareStream’s
encoding methodology
Batch upload high volumes of rich media content in a streamlined
manner to a variety of storage locations
Syndicate digitized content to storage locations in campuses across
the globe
Feature List
Digitize
Archive
Preserve
Batch upload
Syndicate
Store
Search
Control
Deliver
Integrate
Create
Author
Audit
Features & Benefits:
Rich Media Management and Delivery System
Store and manage media in an enterprise-wide asset-management system optimized for
large rich media files
Search and efficiently browse for and identify relevant learning objects via metadatadriven advanced search
Control access to copyrighted content via higher education-specific rights management,
access control, security, and identity management
Deliver online media globally via streaming, download within learning managements
systems to users with wide-ranging levels of Internet connectivity
Integrate with universities' internal systems, including interoperability with learning
management systems and integration with universities’ authentication and authorization
and single sign-on technologies, all of which ensures that mission-critical content is
available to students wherever they go online to learn
Create educational videos synchronized with slides and tablet activity with ShareStream’s
Course Producer module
Author web 2.0 learning objects comprised of video, audio, podcasts, images, and
segments from e-books in a template-based drag-and-drop fashion that faculty with
minimal digital literary can create for courses
Audit all user and content accesses via a reporting tool that allows institutions to manage
digital media licenses
The ShareStream Solution: Technical Architecture
ShareStream is benchmarked with Sun Hardware
Small Configuration: 50 Courses, 1,500 Students
Server
Sun Fire T2000 Servers (Two ) or Sun
4500 (One)
Storage
5 TB
OS
Linux
Medium Configuration: 200 courses, 6,000 students
Server
Sun Fire X4200 (Two ) or
Sun Fire X4200 (One) and Sun 4500
(One)
Storage
Sun 4500 or Sun StorageTek 5320
OS
Linux
Large Configuration: 1,000 courses, 30,000 students
Server
Sun Fire X4200 (Four )
Storage
Sun StorageTek 6140/6540
OS
Linux