The academic world is moving at a rapid pace. Instructors must cover more content in less time, while still ensuring that students are learning and retaining the material. Wouldn’t it be great if the face to face classroom time could be used for open-eneded discussion instead of “sit and git” lecture? Would students want this convenience? Would students see this as an alternative to attending class?
From Inside Higher Ed:
A new study released today suggests not only a willingness but a “clear preference” among undergraduates for “lecture capture,” the technology that records, streams and stores what happens in the classroom for concurrent or later viewing.
The study, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s E-Business Institute, tackles the much-discussed question of students’ preferences for traditional versus online learning with unusual rigor. Based on a survey of more than 29,000 undergraduate and graduate students at the university, the study had a response rate of over 25 percent. Almost half of the undergraduates — 47 percent — had taken a class with lectures available for online viewing. Read more…
Several companies have developed solutions that enable instructors to record their lecture material and make it available online, so students have immediate access to the lecture content.
Panopto - CourseCast 2.0 sets a new standard for ease-of-use in lecture, meeting, and presentation capture technology. CourseCast includes several new features that make it ideal for quickly and effectively capturing, streaming and archiving lecture material in a fraction of the time and cost of competing systems. Panopto offers the system FREE to K-12 and higher ed institutions.
Tegrity - Tegrity Campus 2.0 is at system that makes class time available all the time for EVERY student by automatically capturing, storing and indexing every class on campus for replay – whether accessed online, on an iPod or by a variety of other mobile devices. With patented Tegrity “search anything” technology, students can instantly recall key class moments at any point during a captured lecture by searching on any text presented in class.
Echo 360 - Gain a competitive advantage through on-demand learning. The EchoSystem’s modular product design makes implementation easy, with solutions to meet curriculum, technology, and budgetary needs. Automatically schedule, capture, and publish with no additional personnel. Monitor—and make updates—through a central interface.
I envision a process similar to receiving podcasts from ESPN on my iPhone:
1) Go to school podcenter site
2) Select my classes
3) Choose the date of the lecture I wish to view
4) Watch lecture, whether as review or preparation for class
Instructors may be intimidated by this learning solution for the simple fact that they will have to come out from behind the lectern and actually interact with their students. If a student can pass the class by just using the lecture notes, then what is the purpose of the instructor? Where is the REAL learning? It reminds me of the Rodney Daingerfield movie, “Back to School”. He sets a tape recorder in his seat to record the lecture. Before long, everyone is doing the same thing, and the instructor is alone in the classroom. This movie was in 1986, long before the advent of online learning, but the concept is the same.
As one school observed:
“Student retention has improved among adult students taking hybrid courses, because the technology enriches the online component to keep them engaged. And with more flexible scheduling, students can also take more classes per quarter and graduate earlier.”
