Distance learning may not be a new concept, but the technology has evolved quite a bit in the last decade. Take the program at Western Nevada College (WNC). It’s been around for 25 years and until recently, the school was using interactive television or ITV to deliver its increasingly popular distance education courses to small satellite campuses across the state.
“Like most schools, distance learning has grown here. It’s 25 percent of our overall enrollment,” says Clarence Maise, distance education coordinator for WNC.
WNC is a community college that serves a rural area of about 18,000 miles. The region’s mountainous terrain makes it difficult to travel, leaving some students who live reasonably close to campus with a two to three hour commute. Others have no way of getting to the campus at all. As a community college, WNC also has a large population of non-traditional students or adult learners who have full time jobs and families that rely on them. The flexibility of distance education is crucial to meet the needs of all learners. So when the college was hit with budget cuts, simply shutting down the program wasn’t an option.
“State funding had declined. In the next budget cycle there is going to be another two million dollar cut,” says Maise. “The small, rural satellite campuses we had are all gone. They all closed. So we started looking at different technology to make up for the loss of the remote sites.”
Distance Learning for the Modern Classroom
While distance education may have started out as a large and expensive technology proposition, it’s now much more scalable and far more affordable to carry out. WNC used to lease T1 lines for its ITV solution, which can be very expensive in rural states. Classes were then broadcast between a main campus and smaller satellite campuses. This approach was not only costly, but also inconvenient.
“It’s not as popular with students because you still have to drive to campus. You still have to come to a 6:00pm class,” says Maise. Even if you weren’t driving to the main campus, you still had to be at a satellite location for a specific time.
Now, distance ed courses are delivered via Mediasite, a lecture capture and webcasting platform by Sonic Foundry. Courses can be watched from any computer or mobile device and are even archived for students to watch at a later time. This method of delivery offers far more flexibility. The platform also uses optical character recognition (OCR) to scan the teacher’s slides recorded by Mediasite and create metadata. This makes the stored recordings searchable, a huge leap forward for WNC.
“It was a big deal for us because we went from a point to point video model that had no recording at all. If you didn’t show up to class, you didn’t get to see it…We [now] have live streaming directly to the student and we have archived streaming,” says Maise.
Lecture capture technology offers great promise for the future of distance education, making true on-demand learning a possibility. WNC has built several lecture capture rooms across its campuses, where these recorded classes take place. Maise was very involved in the design of the spaces and in choosing the technology they would house. Each room contains a Mediasite HD recorder, a Vaddio WallView HD-USB camera, a Vaddio Easy USB Ceiling MicPod, a Mitsubishi WD570U projector, a Da-Lite Screen, a Smart Podium 524 interactive pen display and a VFI Economy podium.
“We wanted this to be very different. We wanted the faculty to look at not only doing the lecture capture, but teaching differently in the rooms,” says Maise.
WNC now offers four types of classes: flex, online and face-to-face. Flex classes are held in a face-to-face classroom. The sessions are captured and students have a choice whether they want to come to lectures or whether they will watch the videos on their own time. Other classes are entirely online delivered via the learning management system, Canvas. Some are face-to-face classes that are Web enhanced where students attend a physical class, but complete activities online. The last type of class offered by the college is your traditional face-to-face class. While many of those courses are captured and archived, students are still responsible for actually showing up.
The lectures are recorded in a picture-in-picture format. Students can see the professor and whatever he or she writes on the Smart podium interactive pen display. Faculty has been tutored on the importance of using keywords in their presentations, which makes searching the archived lectures a painless process.
The Requirements
“We’re not a tiny community college, but because of budget cuts everything is pretty thin,” says Maise.
There is only one system administrator on campus so one of the requirements for the new distance learning technology was that there be no servers to attend to. WNC chose a hosted solution from Sonic Foundry, meaning updates are conducted automatically and there is nothing that needs to be done day-to-day on the college’s end.
“Everything we purchase now, in particular for distance ed, is hosted,” says Maise. The learning management system used to deliver the online courses or components is hosted at Amazon by Canvas.
The Mediasite platform also allows for pre-set scheduling that delivers automatic recording. Professors don’t have to worry about turning the recorder on, their class time is scheduled before the semester starts and when they walk into the room, the system is ready to go. The recorders housed in lecture capture rooms on other WNC campuses across the state can even be activated remotely from WNC’s main campus in Carson City where Maise is located.
The lecture capture spaces were designed to be as easy as possible to operate. This wasn’t the case with WNC’s old ITV rooms that had multiple remotes that each controlled a different piece of A/V technology. Even Maise, who is comfortable with technology, recalls being confused when using the ITV room for faculty training.
“Some of these rooms had as many as three remotes. You had to turn the projector on and you had to turn on this and you had to turn on that,” he says. “I’ve got a remote in each hand and I can’t seem to get anything to work.”
Designing a space that is easy to use is key to getting faculty to adopt new technology. If it’s too complicated, professors are likely to get frustrated since their class time is already limited. In fact, Maise wasn’t worried about the technology aspect of this project at all. His biggest concern was adoption.
“To have teacher’s adopt this into their everyday teaching is always a problem,” says Maise. Many professors have been teaching the same way for 30 years and to convince them of the merits of a new method can be difficult.
Ease of use then is a very important factor that should not be overlooked when designing learning spaces. This is something WNC kept in mind.
“We built something that’s faculty friendly because ultimately we build the room and we step away and it’s actually theirs,” says Maise. “Sometimes when you design and build anything, the real art in this is understanding what the end user is going to need and want.”
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Video: Watch this video for a tour of WNC’s lecture capture rooms.
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