4-page Case Study - Posted 9/26/2007
Views: 851
Rate This Evidence:
Web Conferencing Service Saves University Money, Strengthens Communications
Barry University, a private school with 9,300 students in Miami Shores, Florida, wanted to better meet the online communications needs of its administration, faculty, staff, and students. The university was using both Microsoft® Office Live Meeting (2003) and third-party videoconferencing equipment for distance education classes, training, and meetings. The videoconferencing solution, however, was costly and lacked integration with the university’s network infrastructure. In June 2007, the school deployed the latest version of Office Live Meeting. Now, university employees and students have access to live video, document sharing, live chat using VoIP, and archived video recordings. Barry University calculates that using Office Live Meeting could save more than U.S.$100,000 at the main campus and more than $20,000 at each of the school’s 20 satellite campuses in 2007.
Situation
Barry University, founded in 1940, is an accredited Catholic university located in Miami Shores, Florida, that serves 9,300 undergraduate and graduate students. With more than 870 faculty members and 2,000 administrative and support staff, the university provides hands-on career preparation in the liberal arts and sciences. In addition to its main campus, Barry University has permanent satellite teaching sites in 15 locations throughout Florida. The university also has additional satellite campuses that fluctuate in number depending on enrollment demands. Throughout its curriculum, Barry University provides students with rich interactive online distance learning opportunities that meet diverse educational needs.
 |
The migration to Office Live Meeting (2007) could save the university in excess of $20,000 at each remote site and more than $100,000 on the main campus.  |
|
|
John Beaubrun
Vice Provost, Chief Technology Officer, and Dean for Information Technology
Barry University |
|
|
The university was using a combination of disparate technologies for on-campus and distance education communications. For example, it used the Microsoft® Office Live Meeting (2003) Web conferencing service for some instructional technology courses and for faculty and staff training sessions. Third-party environments also made it possible for instructors, administrators, and staff to use video conferences for teaching classes and for conducting training sessions and meetings. Additionally, some teachers who instruct online were using Blackboard software, which provides a mostly asynchronous environment that simulates a traditional classroom experience but that has limited chat room functionality.
One third-party solution required an expensive infrastructure that included maintaining a conference room with T1 lines and direct dedicated circuits at the university's main campus and at each of its satellite campuses. The university found this solution to be time-consuming for users because conference rooms had to be reserved, and users sometimes found the rooms to be unavailable at desired times. In addition, this solution was both time-consuming and expensive to set up at short-term locations.
Arel Anyware software made it possible for instructors to have video conferences with online students. However, students had to log on twice—once for Office Live Meeting and once for the Arel Anyware server—before they could participate in a video conference. In addition, the solution limited the number of users who could participate.
“We had a growing demand to look beyond our third-party solutions,” explains John Beaubrun, Barry University Vice Provost, Chief Technology Officer, and Dean for Information Technology.
Barry University wanted a simpler Web conferencing system that would replace the multiple solutions it was using. Additionally, it wanted a solution that would provide a rich multimedia experience, that would reduce costs, and that would integrate with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office Professional 2007, and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, which the campus will deploy by December 2007.
Solution
Khaled Deeb, Associate Professor and Academic Coordinator of Information Technology, organized a taskforce in May 2006 that included Dr. Linda Cahill, Ph.D., Assistant Dean of Distance Education Support, and faculty members from various academic disciplines at the University.
“There were two separate approaches to the evaluation,” Deeb says of the task force’s analysis. “We looked at how well a new solution would integrate with our existing campus communications system, and how well it would perform as a teaching tool.”
Task force members sought a solution that included easier and less expensive live videoconferencing, interactive whiteboard capabilities, attendee response polls, event and class registration, and rich media presentations that could incorporate movie clips, Flash animation, and audio. In addition, it was vital that the new solution include the ability to archive online sessions including presentations, instant messages, and shared video files.
“We completed an intensive evaluation of products that we could employ in our classrooms to enrich the learning process both for students and for faculty,” Beaubrun says. “We looked at the ease of use, the ease of integration, and the way each product built on our existing technological infrastructure so that we would be able to implement it without having to go through a lot of hurdles.”
|
Microsoft Office Live Meeting (2007) provides a new delivery environment at Barry University that enhances our programs and makes them attractive to students who otherwise would not be able to participate. |
|
|
Khaled Deeb
Associate Professor and Academic Coordinator of Information Technology
Barry University
|
|
|
Although the task force considered continuing to use Arel Anyware for video conferencing, members concluded that the Microsoft Office Live Meeting (2007) Web conferencing service would save the university money and provide richer media experiences and seamless integration with the university’s existing Microsoft infrastructure.
Replacing third-party solutions with the latest version of Office Live Meeting offered the university a wide spectrum of communications functionality in one solution. The enhancements in Office Live Meeting (2007) provide a streamlined user experience, embedded Flash, two-way phone and voice over IP (VoIP) audio, high-fidelity recording and playback, and live webcam video including panoramic video conferencing through the Microsoft RoundTable™ conferencing and collaboration device.
Deeb was so impressed with the new Office Live Meeting that he wanted to move quickly to pilot it to the students who were enrolled in a Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) course he taught during the 2007 summer session. In addition, Cahill wanted to evaluate the product for training and meeting purposes. Microsoft accommodated the university’s needs by enrolling it in a beta rollout of the 2007 version in June.
“I invited my MSIT summer students to start using Office Live Meeting in one of my online sessions, and then asked them for feedback,” Deeb says. By the time the first eight-week session of the fall semester began in August 2007, Office Live Meeting was also deployed to five Bachelor of Science IT programs. Meanwhile, Cahill used the beta version of Office Live Meeting for various training opportunities with faculty and staff on campus.
Deployment was easy, says Beaubrun, involving only two IT members. “Because we are using the hosted solution, 90 percent of the deployment was on the Microsoft side, so it went very, very smoothly,” he says.
Overall, the latest version of Office Live Meeting is helping Barry University to better achieve its mission of being an innovative educational pioneer. “Passive learning is not as conducive to education for all students as interactive learning is,” explains Deeb. “We want all students to be able to connect from wherever they are and to be able to hear and interact with the instructor and others in the class while having an enriched learning environment.”
Benefits
Barry University has found that Office Live Meeting has lowered IT costs, increased enrollment, enriched communications, and expanded training opportunities across campus. Additionally, the solution provides an IT environment that is more technologically integrated and that offers greater security.
Cost Savings of More Than $400,000
In addition to its main campus north of Miami, Barry University maintains 20 permanent satellite locations and another dozen or so remote locations that vary in number from semester to semester. As a result, the university used to allocate a significant portion of its budget to provide videoconferencing and distance education opportunities.
“That’s part of the reason the new service suits us so well,” explains Beaubrun. “The migration to Office Live Meeting (2007) could save the university in excess of U.S.$20,000 at each remote site and more than $100,000 on the main campus,” he says.
The savings generated by the new solution meant that Beaubrun did not need to allocate significant funds to deploy it. “The budget for Office Live Meeting was nominal, really, because it was diverging capital budget from a third-party videoconferencing solution, which required T1 lines and direct dedicated circuits, to an operational expense budget line. Rather than having to deploy that infrastructure, we are able to facilitate it with workstations, our local network, small cameras, and microphones.”
Increased Student Enrollment
As a result of the migration, Barry University has experienced a more than 100 percent increase in enrollment in the Master of Science in Informational Technology classes. These courses, which used to average 12 students, now use Office Live Meeting to attract students who can’t travel to the main campus or to a satellite location to attend class but who can now get the full benefit of an interactive classroom while sitting at their home workstations.
“This semester we averaged 31 students in the MSIT classes because we are using the new Office Live Meeting,” says Deeb. “The program attracts more students because it blends traditional learning with online learning. Students who care about interacting with the professor, but who don’t have the convenience, time, or flexibility to be in the traditional classroom, really appreciate the service.”
As a result of early Live Meeting success stories, other university programs including the School of Education and the School of Anesthesiology are looking to replace third-party videoconferencing systems with Office Live Meeting.
“Microsoft Office Live Meeting (2007) provides a new delivery environment at Barry University that enhances our programs and makes them attractive to students who otherwise would not be able to participate,” says Deeb.
Enriched Communications Experience
Faculty at the university, including early users Deeb and Cahill, discovered that the latest version of Office Live Meeting provides a powerful multimedia videoconferencing environment for both teaching and training.
“Based on the experiences we’ve had with Office Live Meeting, instructors can have richer classroom interaction because students are able to see and experience whatever happens in the classroom even though they are not physically there,” says Deeb. “Students are able to speak, share their applications, and be seen by using the video webcam.”
Students have said that they like the Live Meeting improvements. “By using the new Office Live Meeting survey tools, we’ve created a standardized online end-of-course evaluation tool that is geared to learning about student experiences,” Deeb explains. “The feedback from students about Office Live Meeting has been amazingly positive.”
The Microsoft RoundTable system, which provides a 360-degree panoramic video display that follows each speaker in a meeting, further enriches the Office Live Meeting experience. The university is piloting a beta version of RoundTable, and Beaubrun says that he, his staff, and others on campus who have used it for meetings have been impressed with the results.
“The RoundTable system has given us a type of experience for administrative meetings that we did not have prior to the new Office Live Meeting. It helps the remote meeting participant to feel present in the room,” he says.
Expanded Training Opportunities
Cahill says the migration to the newest Office Live Meeting is generating significant interest in training opportunities. Among her responsibilities is providing staff and faculty with training, both in a traditional classroom-based setting and online by using Live Meeting, in applications such as the Microsoft Office PowerPoint® presentation graphics program, the Office Excel® spreadsheet software, and Office Word.
“Faculty members now seem twice as inclined to ask for help from me or to engage in a brief workshop as they were before Live Meeting,” she says. In addition, because the hosted Office Live Meeting extends service to as many as 1,250 participants at one time, she will be able to meet her objective of at least doubling the number of people she trains simultaneously.
The new service also expands Cahill’s ability to reach the more than 500 adjunct instructors throughout Florida who teach at remote sites or online from their homes. The time and expense that were involved in providing traditional training opportunities for part-time faculty were obstacles in the past, Beaubrun says. “Linda would occasionally travel around the state to meet with a small group of people, but for the most part, it was time and cost prohibitive.”
One feature that Cahill really appreciates is that “in terms of training people to use Office Live Meeting, it’s almost nothing.” She’s created two short animated tutorials for attendees and presenters and has posted them on the Web. “That seems to be working quite well,” she says.
Integrated, More Secure IT Environment
Beaubrun says one of the significant benefits of moving to the newest version of Office Live Meeting is that it integrates with the other Microsoft products in Barry University’s IT infrastructure, which means that the IT staff doesn’t have to be retrained and recertified on other environments.
In addition, the service now includes Microsoft Forefront™, which helps the university to maintain a more secure IT environment by scanning the documents that online participants share.
Cahill says that users have been relieved to know that Forefront is scanning documents before they are shared with other students and instructors. “Some faculty were reluctant at first to use online handouts or to allow students to upload their own content until we told them that we had the Forefront scanning function going on,” she says.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information by using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Barry University, call (800) 756-6000 or visit the Web site at:
www.barry.edu
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published September 2007
