UMass Lowell Making Learning Leaps with Lecture Capture Initiative

When students started struggling in an enhanced calculus class back in 2005, Randy Tyndall and his team wanted to install a solution to help.

Their solution of choice was a lecture capture system by Echo360, which enabled professors to capture lectures and computer demonstrations on a single screen for students to view after class.

Now, almost ten years later, Tyndall says over 86 UMass Lowell classrooms are equipped with lecture capture solutions, with students and professors asking for more.

“It’s grown large,” says Tyndall, Instructional Technologist at UMass Lowell. “Students are demanding it, they ask faculty why aren’t they doing lecture capture in their classes.”

Mary Young, Senior Director, Marketing at Echo360 says that UMass Lowell has been one of the company’s earliest clients, and that Echo360 has watched the university grow with its lecture capture solutions.

“I think the school has really empowered people like Randy to do a fabulous job,” she says. “They’re a great group…They’ve been a client for a long time; they were an early adopter.”

Young also says that the university’s partnership with Echo360 helped scale students’ and professors’ demands, and broaden the IT department’s awareness of how pedagogy and lecture capture solutions are connected.

“They deterred to automated solutions like Echo360, where it enabled their IT staff to focus not so much on the technology, but on the freedom to focus on teaching and learning,” she says. “It’s important that IT guys aren’t just focused on the technology. They need to think about how it’s going to integrate into the curriculum and the student learning experience.”

Tyndall says that last semester, 188 different classes utilized lecture capture for their students, accumulating over 130,000 student views.

“Nine p.m. to one a.m. are the most popular viewing hours,” he says. “That number spikes during finals.”

Tyndall says professors were initially hesitant to welcome lecture capture in their classrooms.

They thought “students wouldn’t come to class,” he says. “We’d say that this is a reinforcement tool. Sometimes students are so busy taking notes that they miss the point of class. Now, they can go back and watch it with their notes.”

Tyndall says the university has seen big benefits to the lecture capture solution:

Adapting active learning & the flipped classroom

Tyndall says since installing lecture capture on campus, professors’ one-on-one time with students has been cut down, which encourages students to do more active learning.

“Students want to use it all the time,” he says.

Tyndall also says that lecture capture has been playing a huge role in the flipped classroom. He says this helps professors include supplemental material for their lectures outside of class.

“Professors can say, “I recorded something, you should look at, something we couldn’t cover in class,” Tyndall says.

He says lecture capture helps the learning continue even when class is canceled, such as from inclement weather.

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