Russell Beard, Director of Information and Communication Services at Big Bend Community College, will present on this topic Tuesday, January 26 at 11:00 a.m. Central. Like all our webinars, it is free. Just register before we go live.

How is one of the smallest community colleges in the state of Washington with one of the largest service districts - 4,000 students across 4,500 square miles - finding the money, time and political will to launch new programs at a time like this?

Russell Beard of Big Bend Community College will show you how.

After twelve years investing deeply in videoconferencing, the college found it was still a struggle to maintain a stable environment over the course of an 11 week quarter. They'd lose a connection, a mic would go out or they weren't able to capture the visual aids from multiple devices.

Then when the economic crisis hit, they had to take a hard look at their education technology infrastructure, soon realizing they were spending a 6-figure sum to generate maybe 6 FTE credits.

That's when they decided to move entirely to webcasting via Mediasite.

Beard will present how Big Bend Community College:

• Launched new programs in the face of budget cuts through executive buy in and grant writing
• Moved from having to beg, borrow and threaten faculty to use their technology-enabled classrooms to having a line of faculty waiting to get in
• Determined webcasting with Mediasite to be the most cost effective approach for reaching every one of their constituents with a decent internet connection
• Created best of breed hybrid class offerings with virtual classrooms, lectures and office hours both synchronous and asynchronous
• Leverages Mediasite for creative uses outside of lecture capture in the classroom, including Small Business Administration courses, board of trustee meetings and their State of the College address

About the presenter

Russell Beard is the Director of Information and Communication Services at Big Bend Community College (BBCC). He has served in this capacity at the college for over nine years. BBCC has worked to be an innovator in distant education for over twenty years having one of the largest service districts in the state of Washington. Russell has served on numerous state commissions and councils providing a vision for technology and its use in the classroom not only for BBCC but for all of the Community and Technical Colleges in the state.

Don't miss out on the opportunity for the live Q&A - register now.

Philip G. Forte, President of Blue Sky Broadcast, will present "What Every Association Should Know About Online Education - Before You Do Your First Webcast" tomorrow, January 26, at 1:00 p.m. As always, this webinar is free. Simply register before the event.

Feel like you should be doing more online education but not sure how to fit it into your existing day to day?

You aren't alone.

Budget and time constraints have made it harder for members to travel for continuing education and professional development, while digital venues have grown exponentially. From listservs to forums to social media - people have never had more opportunities to learn from each other online.

Yet, many associations continue to wrestle with how to create their own online education initiative: How do we integrate it into our plan? How do we price it if we do? How do we deliver CEUs online?

In this webinar, Phil will share his roadmap, including case studies, for how to introduce online learning - like live webcasts and on-demand webinars - into your membership offering.

He's worked with over 200 nonprofit associations whose primary mission is member education, helping them navigate:

• How to deliver more membership value with webcasting, from taking live meetings to a broader audience to populating your education portal with live and on-demand webcasts
• Where online education fits in your mission on the spectrum of public information to revenue generation
• What are the most common business models, and what types of presentations make for the best online learning content
• When to move from just offering on-demand presentations to streaming live
• Why some online education initiatives become lasting endeavors and others fail

Here's that registration link again.

A story on NPR this morning, "Lost King Speech To Be Heard After 50 Years" got me thinking: you may never know just how valuable the presentations you capture will become.

Back in January 1960, Bethel College in Newton, Kansas played host to Martin Luther King Jr. In preparing for the 50th anniversary celebration of that speech, college officials realized they didn't have a copy. No transcript. No audio. Nada.

They put out an email to the school's alumni asking if anyone had a copy, and a retired engineer named Randy Harmison came to the rescue. He’d recorded the audio of several events at Bethel, but this one no one else had thought of recording it. He plugged into the public address system on a whim, “not for documentation, just to have as a keepsake,” he told NPR.

NPR also interviewed a professor at Bethel who remembered listening to the speech. He recalled how King kept repeating “we need to be maladjusted to our society, we can’t accept the status quo.” That’s a powerful theme when repeated today by an onlooker who was there back in 1960. But even more powerful this morning as the professor recalled the theme, and then NPR could play back King’s exact words (you can hear the story, including excerpts from King’s speech, here on NPR’s site around minute 2:45 in the audio).

It’s a great lesson for us who are in the business of webcasting. Each day across the globe, Mediasite could be capturing a presentation that may change the world. Guest speakers, classroom lectures, company meetings. You never know when something someone says is going to take on monumental significance. There’s no way to tell whether scholars fifty years from now will want to refer back to a speech as an important historical record.

My takeaway: never, never hesitate to hit the record button on that Mediasite Recorder. Future generations may thank you.

You know how it is. You start a blog one year. You start off year two with your most popular posts from the previous year. Can’t be avoided. Simply has to be done. Might even be a law somewhere.

Who are we to argue?

We started the World of Webcast blog in March last year and 70 posts later, we’re seeing some trends. Here’s what you dug in 2009, plus why we think you dug it.

1. 4 Tips for Writing Presentation Titles that Attract Eyeballs

Face it. If you do webcasts – whether you are presenting or planning or shooting or scheduling – you are hoping someone tunes in. And this little ditty can help.

2. UNLEASH 2009: Energizing Mediasite Users On-site and Online

Bit of a surprise to see this one in the number 2 slot as it was our nomination for a Forrester Groundswell Award, but then again, we’re guessing it became popular because we actually won (yay!),  and we gave away our playbook for free in a December webinar: "Using Webcasting and Social Media to Increase Attendance, Followers and Fans: An UNLEASH09 Case Study."

3. Mediasite 5.2 Is Here – And It’s Ahead of Schedule

What? Something ahead of schedule? That’s news. And so was the Recorder Control Center. Plus, who doesn’t love a little face time with Director of Engineering Dharmesh Sampat.

4. Read for the Record: Devour “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” with Matt Lauer, Arizona Governor Brewer and Mediasite

It’s all about the caterpillar. Or the celebrities. Either way, it’s hard to watch/read without smiling.

5. Making Multimedia Better for the Visually Impaired - An Interview with Orville Maxon

Besides great advice on the (often incorrect) assumptions many make about people with disabilities, Maxon and Pollard go back to basics with what makes a good PowerPoint and why most PPTs are worthless.

6. See You at InfoComm and EduComm (and Sloan C and Moodle Moot) Next Week?

Combined, these four events attracted ~32,000 people (with InfoComm being the obvious elephant in the room, it’s the biggest AV show event in the world). A few of them were bound to check out what we had in store.

7. OfficeMax Launches Product via a) Webcast b) Blogcast c) Mediasite d) All of the Above

Twitter played a role in the popularity of this post. If you haven’t noticed yet, the 18 million people on Twitter love to talk to each other about why Twitter rocks. That and marketers love bite-sized case studies with stealable ideas and OfficeMax served up a buffet of marketing goodness by webcasting their product launch with Mediasite Events, with the results to prove it.

8. Mediasite, Wharton and Courses about the Financial Crisis

Wharton’s name alone inspires many business people to click. But when you combine Wharton + online courses + financial crisis, that equals timely reading for 2009.

9. A Different Kind of Online Education: the UC Merced Commencement and Michelle Obama Keynote

The Obama’s sweep the nation with a flurry of graduation speeches and the First Lady chooses Merced’s first full graduating class to receive her very first address. Mediasite was there.

10. Smart Classrooms Make A Difference in Trying Times

Be it interruption from H1N1 or financial gaps, 2009 was a banner year for “academic continuity planning” and educational technology had a seat at the table.

So that's the year in review. But don’t leave us guessing on why these hit home. Leave a comment and let us know if we missed your favorite. Or what you’d like to see in 2010.