Uniguest Leaves the Competition Standing at Oakham School.
Oakham School is an independent school based in Oakham, Rutland, offering boarding, flexi- boarding and day provision for boys and girls.
The school has approximately 1,000 students aged between 10 and 18. In the sixth form, pupils can study either A- Levels or the International Baccalaureate Diploma (IBDP). Oakham is one of the country’s top performing IB Diploma schools and also produces consistently high GCSE and A-Level results The school is dedicated to blending academic excellence with a richness of opportunity beyond the classroom to prepare girls and boys for the life challenges they will face.
Oakham prides itself on combining high standards of teaching with opportunities for independent study to create intellectual curiosity among students and help them fulfil and exceed their academic and intellectual potential.
Here at Oakham, staff are responsible for managing their own content and data. We were
looking for a solution that teachers could use whenever they needed to, with minimal input
from the technical team. The high quality video content and in-depth permission settings within
Uniguest were a huge draw for us, and made it very easy for us to implement the platform
throughout the school.
Carl Wood
Supporting a Culture of Empowerment
The culture of empowerment at Oakham School extends beyond pupils to encompass everyone in the school. This culture was in part responsible for the decision to replace the school’s outdated ClickView media storage and management platform with Uniguest, as Assistant Network Manager Carl Wood explains:
A Future-proof Solution
Oakham School had a huge VHS media archive, bringing with it many challenges: tape degradation, availability, loss – not to mention the fact that the playback equipment was becoming obsolete.
The Information Systems department initially created its own solution in house, but knew this wasn’t a viable long-term option and began to look elsewhere for help.
Five years on, Uniguest plays a fundamental role in life at Oakham and is used across all subject areas in a range of different ways.
“The video content that we have built up in our media archive is excellent, and we treat Uniguest as our own internal YouTube,” says Carl. “We get very good viewing figures – between 30 and 40 views a day, and thousands over the course of a year. In lessons, Uniguest is the ‘go to’ for video. Everyone knows about it, and everyone uses it.
In our original search for a product that could catalogue, store and stream media in a simple
and manageable way, we initially chose ClickView,” Carl says. “After two years, we realised that
the platform simply couldn’t offer the content management capabilities we were looking for. We
wanted a solution that enabled staff and pupils to create and manage content as well as viewing
it, and that’s when we discovered Uniguest at BETT 2011. It ticked all of the boxes for us,
and we haven’t looked back since.
Carl Wood
Capturing Lessons and Events
The sports department records all matches – home and away – and gives parents password-protected access to recordings, so they can still watch matches even if they are unable to get to them in person. Pupils
and coaches also use the footage for post-match reviews.
Where online assessment is used in the school, Uniguest is the go to solution. At Oakham, the drama department makes most use of this functionality: “Every play and every rehearsal is also recorded
and stored,” says Carl. “The permissions settings are very useful, too; there are certain sections that only the director of drama can access. We are required by the exam boards to keep footage for a certain length of time, and be able to retrieve it if required. Uniguest makes this very easy to achieve.”
Helping with Lesson Preparation
Oakham School use Uniguest’s classroom capture functionality as part of the flipped classroom. Carl says that the English department in particular use it to go through passages of writing ahead of a lesson and raise points for analysis and discussion in class.
Teachers in all departments record and use broadcast footage widely in the classroom, too, with Freeview and TV recording the most popular Uniguest feature at Oakham.
We have 30 Freeview channels and store 36 days’ worth of footage,” Carl says. “Staff use it a
lot for recording, and love it – largely because it’s so easy to use and they can very easily access
exactly what they want. We use the Heritage Library System within the school and also have a Moodle VLE. The Uniguest plugins work well, although we tend to find that whilst everyone in school links to
Uniguest in some shape or form, it’s often independent of the VLE
Carl Wood
Providing Creative Digital Signage Applications
There are currently 10 digital signage screens located across the school, which are used in a variety of different ways. They support the school’s ‘fluid’ classroom structure, in which nobody owns a classroom and screens are used for timetabling, with corridor displays informing pupils where lessons are taking place.
They are also used in the dining hall to display the day’s menus for boarders and by catering staff, who link the system to Outlook to find out how many packed lunches are required on a given day. Sports teams also use the screens to display upcoming fixtures.
Embracing New Features and Functionality
Carl sees significant potential at Oakham for the Uniguest features that are due to be released shortly. “Around 1,000 new videos are added to our library every year, with the current total standing at 5,500,” he says. “Because the system is so heavily used, I think the advanced analytics will be very Useful for us from a housekeeping perspective.
They will enable us to track what content is viewed, how often,
and delete anything that is out of date or no longer needed. That will really help us to keep the archive manageable.
The school has also taken full advantage of the platform customisation tool, and Uniguest is known to everyone as OakhamTV. “Our Marketing team recently undertook an extensive rebranding exercise, and the fact that we can customise the Uniguest interface to make it consistent with the rest of the systems we use throughout the school has been ideal,” Carl says.
The fact that Uniguest is device independent and works cross-platform is crucial for us,”
Carl says. “Every pupil in school has access to different devices, and it would be a nightmare to
manage if the system was device or browser-specific. And the fact that you can readily upload
from mobile is just fantastic – it doesn’t get any easier than that!
Carl Wood
The other thing that I find really helps is the responsiveness of the Uniguest development team. In fact, this is what I find most impressive about them as an organisation. Whenever we ask ‘can Uniguest do…?’, the answer is invariably yes. On the rare occasion that the answer is no, the development team can usually make it happen. They are so open to suggestions and feedback, you find yourself working together with them to create a system that not only works for you, but will raise the standard for everyone else who uses the system, too.
Carl Wood
Unrivalled Support
Carl is full of praise for Uniguest’s functionality and technical support. “The system really is so straightforward to use. 99% of everything here is done by staff, and we receive very few support or technical
queries. The new interface has been very well received by everyone and people find the platform intuitive to use. We’ve been using the new interface for most of this academic year and I haven’t had a single person ask me where something has gone!”
He believes that the ease of use is in part down to the support that’s available within Uniguest itself:
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