Getting active with lecture capture

Recorded lectures are greatly appreciated by students, providing flexibility and allowing them to control when, and where, they review lectures. If you’re not familiar with lecture capture, check out this short video about how it has been used at Navitas Professional Institute:

Last year, over 2500 hours of video were recorded through Echo360 for Navitas Professional Institute, with an average of nearly 40 student views for each hour of video (that’s over 100,000 views in total!).

Echo360 is looking to extend lecture capture with their next generation Active Learning Platform. This does the usual video recording and delivery, with some new features aimed at improving student engagement such as forums & quizzes, live streaming of presentations (in class or elsewhere), and student/teacher analytics dashboards.

The new system is intended to expand the focus of lecture capture, providing the flexibility for students to watch their lectures anytime, while giving teachers more tools to encourage student engagement and create more meaningful learning experiences. You can see an overview of the Active Learning Platform here: http://echo360.com/active-learning.

Some potential uses of the Echo360 Active Learning Platform include:

  • Flip your classroom by recording videos prior to class which include interactive questions about the key concepts you want your students to engage with before the tutorial – then review the analytics to find out which students actually did the pre-work;
  • Adding a back-channel to your lecture to allow students to ask questions during the lecture session;
  • Live streaming your lecture to another campus;
  • A tool for creating activities in a BYOD classroom (no capture required!);
  • Adding polls and quizzes into your lecture to check students’ understanding and draw attention to certain ideas;
  • The system is moved into the cloud, which allows some clever things – live streaming, a single system for all institutions, and unlimited free storage.

Work in progress

This is a new system and at the recent Echo360 Community Conference the company was very open about the work they need to do in the first half of 2016 to better prepare it for widespread adoption. The core lecture capture and student engagement tools are there, but there’s still work to do in the administration and integration areas, such as adding more flexibility in how the videos are displayed in Learning Management Systems such as Moodle or Canvas, and integrating the system with your timetabling system to automate scheduling of lecture capture.

Here at Navitas the Echo360 Active Learning Platform is currently in the early stages of evaluation, with the potential of a pilot being rolled out later in the year. Stay tuned for future developments!