Choosing Your Streaming Vendor for Hybrid Classrooms

Social distancing of 6 feet or more is challenging how education is delivered. How do you accommodate safety measures with in-person and hands-on learning? How do you accommodate and engage remote students and faculty?

Based on the current COVID-19 safety science, bringing less people into the classroom seems to be the most logical solution to maintaining social distance.

However, if in-person classes are the only answer, more spaces, more teachers, and longer school years are needed. It is no longer a question of “if” but “how” to create hybrid classrooms to accommodate everyone within the same time frame.

Educate In-Person, Remotely and Hybrid

There are many hybrid options available to combine live instruction with online resources to teach classes synchronously. These resources include video conferencing, streaming video management, learning management systems, and remote access.

With a portion of students in the classroom, some can watch classes from a remote location simultaneously, while some are viewing on-demand. The remote location can be in a school building, the student’s home, or wherever. There are also likely to be instructors and students who prefer to stay in quarantine. Fortunately, with a flexible hybrid model, every option can be accommodated.

Upgrading from Emergency Remote Teaching

To stream and/or video conference the teacher needs the simplest setup of a webcam and a free video conference account. This is the way most schools have provided “emergency remote teaching.”

But if your school is investing in the hybrid model for the long-term, you need more sophisticated and better quality technology. This includes HD cameras, lighting, and professional video equipment. Equally important is a robust video management platform. This is the private repository of streamed lessons and gatherings, and a library of instructor-created and monitored video-on-demand content.

Choosing a Video Management Platform for Hybrid Classrooms

Teaching is hard under normal circumstances. On-line and hybrid teaching is even more difficult. The frustrations that come with multiple applications and technology for teachers and students add even greater challenges. The solution to ease this frustration and guarantee great outcomes is a single platform to manage all of the video communication and content needs of the school system.

There are many excellent video management platforms that interface with web conferencing and learning management systems for hybrid classrooms. However, picking one can be as difficult a shopping for a mattress.

Rather than comparing features and bit rates, consider how well a platform can serve your district or campus inside and outside of school buildings.

In evaluating a streaming video platform provider for your school system, compare the answers to these questions: 

1. 1. Is it flexible enough to meet your immediate needs?
   2. Can it scale and evolve to meet your long-term technology plan?
   3. Does it meet your security requirements?
   4. Is it a good network citizen and “play nice with others?”
   5. Will your faculty, administrators, students and their support systems easily “get it”
   6. Will it reduce or aggravate their technology stress level?
   7. Is it economical?
   8. Is it well supported?

An All-in-One Solution to Hybrid Classrooms Eases Technology Stress

Yes, those are leading questions meant to bring you to consider our streaming platform. However, it’s warranted; our DEVOS live streaming and video on demand system checks all the boxes of a preferred video provider. It IS flexible, scalable, secure, congenial, user-friendly, economical, and gives high-touch US-based 24/7 support. Additionally, DiscoverVideo is currently helping over a million students and their faculty to navigate through the transition to hybrid classrooms.

The DEVOS portal is a “Swiss Army knife” of video management and communication. It serves the school community inside buildings as well as it does outside of them. It has web conferencing, live streaming, video-on-demand management, and a video creation and assessment tool. It works for synchronous and asynchronous on-line classes. As students advance to and retreat from school buildings, DEVOS can serve the same online content to any device. It can stream IPTV to any monitor, create and control digital signage, and send emergency video and text messaging. 

The platform is available in four different configurations to meet your needs and budget: a one-time software license installed on your network server; an on-premise dedicated server, separate from your network; a cloud-based server account; and a hybrid of software and hardware, on premise and cloud-based.

Surely a single platform like ours, with one sign-on, to create, deliver, manage, and measure your online video experience, will relieve the technology stress of your teachers, students, and school staff.