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One of the goals of the NextGen Michigan initiative was to free unit IT from supporting common infrastructure so that it could focus more on unit-specific tasks and innovation. The School of Public Health (SPH) took this very much to heart, on the one hand taking advantage of “commodity” services that ITS can provide more efficiently and at lower cost (MiStorage, MiServer, MiDatabase), and on the other, reaching out into the cloud for innovative solutions that we now have time and resources to implement.<\/p>\n
We started by tackling the 300-pound sumo wrestler of re-architecting <\/span>our website<\/span><\/a> and putting it behind a suitable CMS. Searching far and wide we finally settled on a cloud-based, commercial CMS called <\/span>OU Campus<\/span><\/a>, by <\/span>OmniUpdate<\/span><\/a>. While not the least expensive option, we liked its “out-of-the-box” readiness for deployment, rich set of features, and user-friendliness\u2014important considerations\u00a0<\/span>given our school\u2019s very decentralized way of updating content. We have now been operating on the OU Campus platform for several years. Our website may soon be ready for another face-lift, but we’re likely to keep the underlying CMS in place, as it continues to serve us extremely well.<\/p>\n The ability to pick and choose cloud-based solutions that are best aligned with our needs and resources gives us the power to innovate.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>Encouraged by that experience, we sought a new, more robust lecture capture system to replace the hardware-based, very expensive Mediasite, and the light-weight, but a bit clunky, Camtasia Relay. <\/span>Panopto<\/span><\/a> became our provider of choice because of its software-based, extremely versatile system and very attractive price. It has served our faculty and students for almost two years now, and we still have not found a worthy contender to its basket of goodies, including real-time webcasting, hosting of external content, and integration with Canvas. In addition, it has a very easy-to-use recording client.<\/span><\/p>\n That only whetted our appetite, and now we’re in the process of implementing two more cloud-based solutions:<\/p>\n All this activity has created an atmosphere of excitement and “sky-is-the-limit” (pun unintended) thinking at SPH. The ability to pick and choose cloud-based solutions that are best aligned with our needs and resources gives\u00a0us the power to innovate\u2014something we almost felt we had lost in the rush to “rationalize” and “centralize.” For us, the promise of NextGen is starting to become a reality.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New lecture capture system<\/h1>\n
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