Brainshark Video Presentations Go Viral at Babson College - Helping Streamline Communications Inside and Outside the Classroom

WALTHAM, Mass., Feb. 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Brainshark, Inc., the leader in online and mobile video presentations, today announced that students, faculty and staff across Babson College are using Brainshark to streamline and improve communications. Originally piloted in one of Babson's MBA programs, Brainshark is now used for graduate and undergraduate class projects and preparation, faculty communications, program office communications, admissions outreach, HR presentations and more – with more than 30,000 hours' worth of Babson's video presentations viewed last year.

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Academic Adoption 
In addition to its strong undergraduate curriculum, Babson also offers full-time and part-time MBA programs – with its MBA education rated No. 1 for entrepreneurship by U.S. News & World Report for the past 19 years. For the Wellesley, Mass.-based institution, business presentations are a critical part of the educational discourse. But with limited face-to-face classroom time – particularly in some of the MBA programs – having students deliver presentations in-person was consuming too many valuable hours.

Now, with Brainshark's cloud-based technology, students can add their voice to PowerPoint decks – creating and submitting presentation content that can be viewed anytime, on-demand, from any computer, smartphone or tablet. Undergraduate and graduate students watch these presentations outside of class – enabling professors to devote class time to discussing them, among other priorities. In the Fast Track MBA program, which meets one weekend every seven weeks, this approach has been especially helpful – sparking dialogue outside of class, as students use Brainshark to create and review "rocket pitches" that describe ideas for new ventures, and subsequently maximize in-class time.

Faculty at Babson also use Brainshark to supplement and enhance the educational experience – creating presentations that recap classroom discussions, provide customized feedback to groups of students, serve as the delivery vehicle for quizzes, and solicit input and ideas via embedded surveys. With Brainshark's analytics capabilities, it's easy to see who has taken quizzes (and how they scored), who viewed follow-up materials – including when and how much – and more. In addition, professors take advantage of Brainshark's integration with Blackboard – delivering Brainshark content within the same online environment as their other classroom resources.

"We looked extensively for an easy way to create multimedia presentations – that could be consumed on-demand, used across departments and viewed on the many different types of mobile devices we see on campus," said Eric Palson, director of instructional technologies at Babson College. "That's exactly what Brainshark offers – through a hosted solution that's easy to access and requires no downloads. It takes next-to-no time for our students, faculty and staff to grasp how to use Brainshark, and we've found it has taken off in a viral way to improve the educational experience. In the coming year, we also plan to use Brainshark to deliver alumni communications and develop certification courses for employees."

Additional Uses
With more than 1,100 Brainshark presentations created by Babson students, faculty and staff last year alone, Babson also uses Brainshark outside of the classroom – for areas including:

• Communications to prospective students. Babson's admissions department distributes interactive Brainshark presentations that recap live Q&A sessions and describe the college's educational offerings.
• Human resources messages. The HR department uses Brainshark to create and deliver presentations that summarize healthcare benefit plans offered.
• Library training. Library staff at Babson use Brainshark to create and disseminate training presentations on library databases, including PowerSearch and Capital IQ.
• IT training. The IT department has likewise created training presentations that can be watched and reviewed on-demand, and help bring staff up-to-speed on how to use new technologies. Using Brainshark's tracking, IT leaders can see who has completed requisite training.
• And more.

"Students, faculty and staff within educational institutions are looking for more effective ways to communicate asynchronously and in richer formats – and Brainshark makes that possible," said Brainshark CEO Joe Gustafson. "With Brainshark, educational institutions like Babson can deliver important information anytime, anywhere – making content instantly accessible to all audiences, on all types of schedules and devices. We look forward to continuing to help Babson deliver educational presentations inside and outside the classroom, to further promote its goals and mission."

To hear more from Palson at Babson on how the college has used Brainshark, please view the following presentation: http://bit.ly/Babson-Testimonial.

About Babson College 
Babson College is the educator, convener, and thought leader for Entrepreneurship of All Kinds™. The College is a dynamic living and learning laboratory, where students, faculty, and staff work together to address the real-world problems of business and society -- while at the same time evolving our methods and advancing our programs. We shape the leaders our world needs most: those with strong functional knowledge and the skills and vision to navigate change, accommodate ambiguity, surmount complexity, and motivate teams in a common purpose to create economic and social value. As we have for nearly a half-century, Babson continues to advance Entrepreneurial Thought and Action® as the most positive force on the planet for generating sustainable economic and social value. For information, visit www.babson.edu.

About Brainshark, Inc. 
Brainshark, Inc. provides cloud-based solutions that help business professionals communicate more effectively in a mobile, social world. Whether your audience is across the table or across the globe, we help you market, sell, educate and inform with maximum impact. Our easy-to-use solutions enable you to transform static documents into dynamic, mobile-ready content that can be accessed quickly, and viewed as on-demand video presentations or presented live – anytime, anywhere. You can also measure the effectiveness of your communications in ways never thought possible and use these insights to take action. Thousands of companies – including half of the Fortune 100 – and millions of individuals rely on Brainshark to increase the impact and reduce the cost of their sales, marketing, training and HR communications. For more information, please visit www.brainshark.com and www.slideshark.com.

SOURCE Brainshark, Inc.