How to Decide Which Technologies Will Boost Blended Learning in the College Classroom

“When you start talking about dropping in pedagogical chunks of lectures that were recorded with lecture capture technologies, its ease of use,” Brown says. “That’s what we’re seeing as a bleed over into distance education. What’s happening is the infrastructure is not locked into one pedagogy anymore.”

Brown says lecture capture solutions enable students to replay lectures outside of class and compare their notes with what the instructor says in the archived video. He also says these solutions help students better prepare for exams.

“What that tells you is that students use lecture capture as text,” Brown says. “They use the lecture itself to review. In the absence of lecture capture, they only have their notes from the lecture, books, etc. Therefore, the ability to review and watch the lecture again, the teacher, which, for most people’s learning style, is the highest, richest moment of learning.

“They’re getting the information presented to them by an expert who is doing their best as a professional to gear themselves to gain the knowledge they know them to have,” he says. “When it’s time for them to do the exam, they want to see them say it again. That to me translates to powerful pedagogy.”

Randy Tyndall, Instructional Technologist at Umass Lowell, says some of the instructors at his university use Echo360‘s lecture capture technologies to record their lectures and replay them multiple times to help students review.

He says these instructors can use the prerecorded lectures as supplementary material outside of class so they can use actual class time to cover another lesson.

“Specifically, we’ve got a class taught by an instructor that is in a clinical lab class in nutritional sciences,” he says. “What he’s done is gone back and recorded probably 15 to 20 tutorial videos of things he would normally cover in class. He’s already prerecorded all of those, which took him a lot of time to do; but once he’s done, he’s using that on a continuous basis for the students who can look at that material, see the material he’s pre-taped, and more effectively participate in the topic discussions…For him, it has strengthened a lot of resources and background material that he’s usually had to assign to either TAs or have extra sessions for those students for a lab. By using the pre-taped material that’s up there and Echo360, the students can come to class prepared.”