When colleges start looking for ways to shine, they need to shape up their distance learning options.
Bill McIntosh, president of Synergy Media Group says that colleges should invest in the technologies that will make their long distance education programs top notch.
“When students look at long distance education programs, they think, if I can go to college anywhere in the world without leaving home, where will I go?” he says. “If there are fifty universities that will provide them with the same benefits when they graduate, then they can be selective.”
In order loan these provisions, McIntosh says colleges to capitalize on the latest and greatest technological opportunities.
When colleges feature distance learning options for students, McIntosh says there are two types of online education.
The first is found in the standard classroom, where students sit in a classroom in two separate locations and the professor teaches in a different location to both classes simultaneously. In this type of classroom setting, the professor instructs a lesson on a projector and screen.
“These classes are probably done with a traditional video conferencing system and standard projector, audio mics, and Crestron touch panels,” McIntosh says. “These are the backbone for video conferences.”
The second type of distance learning is asynchronous learning, which enables professor to shoot videos of themselves teaching class material in a small, on-campus TV studio, and someone edits the videos before they are posted to programs (like Blackboard) on the internet. Students can be located in any country all over the world and still have access to these videos to watch and digest at their leisure.
Marci Powell, the global director for education and training at Polycom, says that professors can keep tabs on their students to make sure they are actually doing their work.
“With programs like Blackboard, professors are able to tap into a video they posted and see what students watched it, when they watched it, and who didn’t watch it,” she says. “Professors can even add pop quizzes or include key word searches into their videos to make sure the students are staying engaged.”
Sean Brown, the vice president of Sonic Foundry says his company provides facilitates video-learning via Mediasite, a built-in system where professors can record lectures, and students can access live stream footage of those lectures, or just watch them later; this method is called “lecture capture.”
With lecture capture, he says that professors don’t have to learn how to be web developers to shoot their content; the system is easy enough for any professor to use while still enabling them to produce a high quality video.
“Teachers want to teach the way they want to teach,” Brown says. “Systems like ours make all that possible.”
Brown also says that lecture capture is a “more sophisticated method” of streaming lectures on the internet “on the fly.” It allows students to open a browser on the “public internet,” rather than a private network, and access videos and other local content.
“This method is less expensive and higher quality,” Brown says. “When students have access to live, on demand content, they ask, “why do I have to be there in class?” Mediasite provides a competitive advantage here, and colleges want to accommodate students not being present in class.”
Edward Adams, the chief technology officer and director of computing services at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, says programs like Mediasite do wonders for the distance learners in the MBA program.
“With Mediasite, we are able to stream live classrooms,” he says. “It’s targeted for our MBA students so they can have conversations about what is happening in California while we’re in Ann Arbor.”
Aside from video streaming developments, Bill McIntosh says other asynchronous learning programs can connect through Cloud based bridge services such as Vidyo and Blue Jeans. With access to this type of connection, students can pool and connect their own devices to access posted content.
“In a program like this, if you have fifty students, you need fifty connections,” he says.
However, McIntosh says that colleges are striving to makes their distance learning classes more interactive. One way is through installing push-to-talk microphones in standard classroom settings.
Marci Powell says that the push-to-talk microphones go live once a student presses the button.
In some classrooms, these microphones work hand in hand with EagleEye HD cameras; one camera will zoom in on the student that pushed the microphone button, while a second camera gets a wide shot of the classroom.
Powell says that both cameras switch between points of view automatically during a class.
“It’s awesome for an instructor that likes to move around,” she says. “They can get a close up of one of their students, but still have their own space to walk around the classroom.”
How EagleEye cameras work
Powell also says that hardware solutions, such as the ones offered by Wow Vision, that connect with software solution like Apple TV enable up to six students and professors to share their work at the same time. One of the major perks working of these systems is that they enable students and professors to work on their own device while showing casing their projects.
“You can be on the touch screen with everyone else, and the rest of the class can see what you’re doing,” Powell says. “It allows for lots of collaboration, note taking and instant messaging.”
Other colleges are installing digital name plates on students’ desks.
“When a student enters the classroom they can turn on the touch panel to activate the name plate,” Bill McIntosh says. “That way, professors can put a name to a face.”
McIntosh also says there are some colleges who are taking their distance learning technology to an even higher level.
Instead of including a regular sixty-inch TV screen in a standard classroom for a professor to view his or her long distance students, McIntosh said Stanford University is filling classrooms “floor to ceiling with projection” for its students studying in Beijing.
“The classroom literally tiers up along the entire ten-foot tall back wall so the professor has full view of the entire foreign classroom,” he says. “The professor has a better visual idea, and can see who’s paying attention.”
McIntosh also said that Stanford classrooms are also working with multiple cameras to stitch together each view to create a complete image of the whole classroom, such as the classes located all the way in Beijing.
“The Beijing campus is wide and not very long,” he says. “We needed a three camera solution – left, middle and right – and stitched them all together. Each screen is one of those cameras, and we stitched them together to create an image of the whole room.”
Edward Adams says the Ross School of Business mirrors a similar telepresence technique so students can interact with companies located in India for their India Initiative project.
“Our Cisco telepresence mirrors the experience we have in Ann Arbor,” he says. “We use the telepresence room, cameras and snapshots [to capture that experience].”
Regardless of which technology a college implements into its distance learning program, Sean Brown says the main goal is to reduce the distractions technology may cause, to do it cheaply, and in the most elegant way.
“You want everyone to feel like they are in the classroom without actually being there,” he says.
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