As millions of teachers and students return to classrooms at academic and research institutions, many of them will be interacting and collaborating with the support of Vidyo’s exceptional visual communications solution. In a recent survey conducted by Vidyo, of students who are currently enrolled in universities and higher education classes, 30% of the respondents indicated that they will attend a Virtual or Distance Learning classroom in the coming academic year. Education institutes across the globe are currently embracing VidyoConferencing™ and its widespread deployment has raised the bar for interactive video communication and collaboration in education.
The long list of Vidyo education deployments includes Carnegie Mellon, Bellarmine, Northwestern, and Emory Universities in the U.S. and Kyushu University in Japan, Porto University in Portugal and Thinking Schools Academy in India, among others. A large number of undergraduate and graduate programs at colleges, universities, and research facilities use Vidyo’s visual collaboration solution for its unmatched accessibility, scalability, quality and affordability. Recent announcements regarding the selection of Vidyo by such renowned academic and research communities such as Internet2 et CERN provide further evidence of Vidyo’s mass adoption.
“The significant number of educational networks and academic institutions that are using our products demonstrates Vidyo’s competitive advantage in delivering a variety of classroom workflows,” said Dr. Amnon Gavish, Vidyo’s Senior VP of Vertical Solutions. “There has been a shift from traditional room-based systems that are limited in quality and scalability to more flexible and affordable solutions that are easy to use and can be accessed via public networks on all the latest mobile devices used by students.”
With video conferencing becoming more affordable and accessible on laptops and mobile devices, interactive visual communications is becoming more prevalent on college campuses. According to Vidyo’s survey, 41% of the student respondents said they used video conferencing on a laptop or mobile device (i.e, smartphone or tablet) for some type of school-related activities during the last academic year. Vidyo™ for Education is proving to be a functional enhancement to the traditional classroom because it enables students to connect, not only from campus classrooms, but from wherever they are located, on devices that they use in their daily lives.
“Vidyo’s technical capabilities have enabled us to deliver our graduate-level computational finance curriculum to students in an online format while optimizing live, interactive communication among students, faculty and each other,” said Drew Eisenbeis, Director of Technology, Computational Finance Program, Carnegie Mellon University. “This visual connectivity is a critical element in teaching our MSCF program, which is recognized as one of the best of its type in the world.”
The success demonstrated by Carnegie Mellon’s Master’s level Computational Finance online program has encouraged the utilization of Vidyo-supported communications for the online portion of CMU’s Tepper School of Business’s new FlexMBA program, which now offers one of the world’s premier business curriculums in a hybrid, flexible format. The FlexMBA learning strategy is based on having small class sections with a very high-level of interaction between students, faculty and school services.
Vidyo vs. Other Solutions
Vidyo for Education is the market’s most mature visual communications solution based on the H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard. Vidyo’s SVC-based system allows a variety of different endpoints to join a video call over the Internet, or other public IP networks, whether from a classroom, a boardroom, or at home, by optimizing the use of available bandwidth. The networking flexibility of its VidyoRoutersTM gives IT managers in academic institutions the capability to optimize the traffic in complex education networks. Vidyo’s solution provides a high level of stable, clear, visual communication, which is imperative for education purposes, since any distraction takes away from the learning experience.
“Vidyo offers features and flexibility that we couldn’t find with other video conferencing systems,” said Dr. David Paige, Assistant Professor, School of Education, Bellarmine University and Executive Director of the Thinking School’s Academy in India. “The Thinking School’s Academy is an education initiative in India that is introducing a new way of teaching to India’s schools, many of which are located in very remote areas. During our instructional and collaboration sessions, people join from a variety of locations – Vidyo allows us to interact clearly over less than perfect networks, and share documents and collaborate as if we were in the same room.”
