BANGALORE: In what could be termed as first time in India Bapatla Engineering College, an Andra pradesh based institute, has announced that it will deploy Cisco Digital Media System to extend the classroom environment and create anywhere, anytime learning experiences.

Cisco Digital Media System will virtualize the classroom environment with remote broadcast and viewing of lectures and on-demand materials. The college will stream live, sessions conducted by visiting professors and subject matter experts to the classrooms. Lectures can be viewed online in 15 classrooms and 40 e-class rooms simultaneously. The solution will also help the institute to simultaneously record and archive the sessions. This will help the students to refer the sessions at their convenience from their hostel rooms as well. The archived sessions is presented to the students over Cisco Video Portal, a web-based application that allows students to quickly browse, search, and view digital media interactively.
 
‘Being a premier institute, we have lectures by several senior professors and subject experts regularly. Providing access to all and archiving these lectures was proving to be a challenge and so we were looking for an e-learning solution that would provide benefits beyond the classroom environment,” says Seshagiri Rao, President, Bapatla Engineering College.
 
‘Although video offers a powerful way to communicate with and educate students, colleges have struggled to effectively deploy high-quality video to the desktop. IT departments worry about the impact of video on network quality, reliability, and availability,’ says Jagdish Mahapatra, Regional Manager (West)-Commercial, Cisco India & SAARC. “Cisco Digital Media System is a solution that integrates rich digital media creation, management and access, for communications anywhere, anytime. The Cisco Digital Media System takes advantage of Cisco’s best practices from more than a decade of video and internet initiatives.”
 
Cisco is partnering with its Premier Partner Shell Networks to deploy Cisco Digital Media System at Bapatla Engineering College. The DMS solution to be deployed includes Cisco Media Encoder 2000, Cisco Digital Media Mgr Base V4.0, Cisco Video Portal V4.0, Cisco Wide Area Application Engine 512, Cisco IP Conference Station and Cisco License Call Manager 5.1. The system is expected to be deployed and go online by July 2007. 

CIOL Bureau