Cisco Show & Share

From 2010 to 2011, I worked with the College's IT Department personnel on the acquisition and implementation of Cisco Show & Share (S&S), an enterprise-level video-based lecture-capture system and "media experience" streaming application. S&S offered webcasting and customizable sharing/privacy options for teachers and students, empowering them with the ability to create highly secure video communities while retaining complete control of the content and user base. Another benefit was the absence of YouTube branding and the menacing presence of irrelevant content.

Show & Share was the right tool for building and maintaining archives of video content that our teachers could post for students in the form of lectures by our faculty, guest scholars, and even student presentations. It was like having our private broadcast channel online; for our chosen audiences. Show & Share allowed our instructors to optimize online teaching practices and enhance global collaborations by simply creating videos captured on the desktop with a webcam and screen-captured footage with or without presentation slides.

Cisco Show & Share enabled our teachers and students to communicate through user-generated video content. Video is everywhere in today's globalized world with social media and the Internet. Today's students and educators need convenient tools for creating, uploading, searching, and viewing dynamic and meaningful multimedia content. Cisco Show & Share provides those tools. Teachers can quickly begin using Show & Share to build content libraries and video communities in just a few simple steps.

To say we had a good run with Show & Share would be an understatement. Our teachers and academic departments flourished with Show & Share, and we approached instructional design with the idea of archiving and building collections of learning content and communities of learners.

Eventually, due to security concerns, the whole system was shut down. It was a sad turn of events but indicative of the reality that technology has a lifespan. Sometimes, even a robust system like Show&Share can have its life cut short when newer tools emerge that are more efficient, more secure, less costly, and require zero maintenance.

Show & Share gave us everything we were looking for in a streaming/webcasting solution. Still, it was expensive, and campus-wide applications like Kaltura and free streaming on YouTube made the expensive upgrades challenging to justify.