Filed under: Work Activities | Tags: grcc, lecture capture, relay, techsmith
One of the best parts about working in instructional technology is the ability to work with faculty to identify a need and then working with the infrastructure team to target and find solutions to meet that need. The ultimate goal at the end of the day is the students’ and their learning.
Enter in the need for easily and effectively capturing a lecture and delivering that lecture (audio and video) to students. Presented with this idea, back in 2006 we met with the team at Techsmith Inc. in Okemos, MI. Many of our faculty were already users of their Camtasia Studio product, but we realized that we needed an ultra-easy recorder that would allow nearly any faculty member to capture their lecture and their screen on-the-fly without needing to worry about codecs, frame rates, timelines, trimming, output formats, ftp, and all sorts of other technical jargon. After this meeting with Techsmith, we entered into a pilot, beta, and case study on using a new product called Camtasia Relay.
Throughout this pilot it became clear that one of the most important factors in selecting a lecture capture tool for the campus was not only the cost of the software, but more crucial was the ease of use. In other words, the big idea here was to search for and acquire a tool that had the potential to be transformative to our campus in that the tool would be effortless to operate for a wide array of faculty.
Enter Camtasia Relay. From the screen shot below, you can see that the client recorder is exceptionally easy to use. Faculty need only to open the Relay client, click the “big red” record button, and finally when finished, they click the submit button. Everything else is done for them. The recording is sent to the Relay server where it is encoded based on a predefined profile, and then published to a server. No FTP for faculty to worry about. No selections for output options, codecs, frame rates, etc. for faculty to be confused with. Once the recording is published the faculty member receives an email with a link to the recording. From there, the faculty member can insert the link into an email, add it to Blackboard, or place it on their personal website. (Additionally, Relay can output to Blackboard automatically via a Blackboard Building Block, and also to iTunes U.)
So as the Fall semester approaches, we will be working to fully deploy Camtasia Relay to our faculty. This tool will undoubtedly be an effective way to:
- better reach our distance learning students,
- provide an easy way for faculty to create video lectures,
- enable students to review a classroom lecture again while studying,
- expand the student’s learning experience.
Filed under: Articles, Work Activities | Tags: blackboard, grcc, iphone, ipod touch
GRCC was recently highlighted in a recent Blackboard Inc. Press Release entitled: “New Blackboard Learn(TM) for Apple(R) iPhone(TM) Application Lets Users Take Learning on the Go”.
In the press release, Nate Schumacher who is a student and a staff member in the Learning Academy was cited for his involvement in the Beta of the application.
“Building on its efforts to engage students and learners in a more personalized learning experience, Blackboard Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBB) today announced the release of a free application that lets users of the Apple(R) iPhone(TM) and iPod touch(R) take learning on the go by accessing course information wherever and whenever they prefer [...]The application is great for quickly checking Blackboard on the go, and it helps me be more engaged and organized even if I’m from away campus,” said Nate Schumacher, a freshman at Grand Rapids Community College in Michigan who participated in the Beta program for the application. “With Blackboard on my iPod touch, I’m checking more often for new grades and updates the same way I check my email. Because it’s so accessible, I can see my progress instantly and get feedback from professors on how I’m doing, so it helps make me a better student. This application has great potential. I would definitely recommend it to other students…”
More information is available on the Blackboard Sync web site.
According to WordReference.com, the word “Frontier” means:
an undeveloped field of study; a topic inviting research and development; “he worked at the frontier of brain science”
Photo from Flickr by pbo31 under the Creative Commons license.
This notion rang true recently for me after Gary Ebels, a professor at GRCC forwarded me an article from the Wired Campus entitled: “Randy Bass and Bret Eynon: We Need R&D for Teaching With Technology“
In this article, Randy Bass, from Georgetown University, and Bret Eynon, from LaGuardia Community College posed the following statement and question:
“When it comes to innovations in teaching and learning, higher education seems like the last to know and the slowest to respond. In every other way, we push at the frontiers of knowledge, ask critical questions, take risks. In all other realms of research, practices of peer review, dialogue, accountability, and replication engender innovation. Why is it the opposite for teaching and learning?”
I thought this was an excellent way of posing the ongoing work and challenges facing education in this highly technical, fast moving, and interactive world in which we find ourselves. Why is it so difficult for educational institutions in adopting new technologies and methodologies? Why is it that we get stuck on theory and principle but can’t quite make it to methods and practices? How can institutions meet change head on and accept it, even though it may reduce control from the departments and individuals that are used to heeding control?
I think Mr. Bass and Mr. Eynon are correct in saying that one of the reasons is that we have little means to take an individual idea or technology from breakthrough to the mainstream. One problem is that for many institutions, the institution’s policies, procedures, and operations exist for the purpose of simply maintaining the status-quo of an institution. And that is why I think it is important to underscore the suggestion in the article. That is, “…we must create communities within institutions that truly engage experimentation in the context of inquiry and systematic improvement. Every campus should have its own R&D processes that nurture transformative practices. Every campus should be asking what it means to create such a space. How can structures of accountability nurture creativity?”
All this being said, educational institutions are approaching a sort of “transformative tipping point” (if you will) where if they don’t change, they run the risk of becoming old and outdated in their desire to preserve the past, as others pass them by. We need to set aside our rigid formal policies and procedures that restrict innovation and creativity and proceed forward. It is true that we can’t do everything, since trying to do everything results in not doing anything really really well. Hence, as the article suggests, every college needs an “R&D department”.
Change happens quickly in our next generation world, and those that are successful will be fast to adopt new technologies and teaching methodologies. It is no longer good enough to be the biggest-on-the-block, you also need to be able to adapt quickly while keeping momentum and the mission dynamic. Put another way, it’s really about flattening the organization so that flexibility can breed enthusiasm which encourages creativity that leverages innovation.
Understandably, with growth and change comes uncertainty, disagreement, etc. but through working together collaboratively with flexibility, I believe this frontier can be explored and leveraged.
Filed under: Articles, Work Activities | Tags: challenges, educause, eli, horizon, learning, report, research, teaching
One of the reports that I always look forward to reading is the Horizon Report [PDF] from the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. This report is always interesting to read and thought provoking. It contains important trends and topics that are an important read for anyone working in education. Whether or not you are a techie with a pocket protector, or a technophobe, or someone that lies somewhere in the middle, this report is well worth reading.
In short, the Horizon Report focuses on the following six areas that will have an impact on teaching and learning within the next 5 years:
- Mobiles
- Cloud Computing
- Geo-everything
- The Personal Web
- Semantec-aware Applications
- Smart Objects
MOBILES – While the debate continues on whether or not to allow cell phones in the classrooms (see School Cell Phone Ban article)… not to mention laptops, one this is clear, mobile technologies will continue to play an ever more important role in our personal lives and also from a productivity standpoint. Take a look at the Apple iPhone ad as a perfect illustration for this. Need a better educational example you ask? Well, ok… check out this iStanford iPhone app video.
In addition to crisis message alerts from GRCC’s Rave Wireless system, the
college is currently working to include the ability for students to subscribe to course related information (announcements, calendar items, assignments, and grades) in the college’s Blackboard system. More information is located on GRCC’s mobile web site.
In addition, the college is working on expanding the use of the iPod Touch for podcasting lectures that are captured with Camtasia Relay to support the work of the AT&T grant that was awarded to the college back in February 2008.
Following along on this mobile theme, GRCC is also looking forward to Blackboard’s iPhone app to provide even better integration for students and their access to course information with an iPhone or iPod Touch.
CLOUD COMPUTING – What is becoming an more common place buzz word in education, this notion will likely be shaping how students and faculty communicate and exchange information. Much of the course information is already available via the web, through GRCC’s Blackboard system as well as publisher web sites. Also, GRCC currently uses Gmail for student email and the Google Apps are a possibility in the future.
GEO-EVERYTHING – While you may lump this into the MOBILES section, there is tremendous potential here for disciplines like geography, history, and science whereby location, combined with imagary provide a wealth of contextual information that provides a more thorough understanding of the materials.
THE PERSONAL WEB – Combining with the students ability to access course content anytime/anywhere is the ability for students to easily share, connect, and collaborate online. Not only can students access information, but they can interact with it, comment on it, engage with it. Services like Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr provide end user generated content that when combined with online community creates a potentially powerful learning environment. GRCC’s YouTube site is already providing a wealth of information that is freely available to not only the students here at GRCC but the community beyond. Combined with that is GRCC’s Facebook page that provides yet another way for individuals to interact collectively… Students are also beginning to use blogs, wikis, and portfolios that are integrated into Blackboard through a Building Block from Learning Objects Inc.
Finally, students can take advantage of Classtop CourseFeed or Blackboard Sync to integrate their personal web space and academic web spaces together.
SEMANTIC-AWARE APPLICATIONS – No where but the web could such a thing be possible. That is, the ability to create connections between items that are seemingly unrelated to generate new meaning. 
While just scratching the surfance, Scholar by Blackboard is one service that already contains rich resources that point to knowledge contruction. However, what’s missing is the intelligence behind connecting all of these seemingly unrelated resources. Albeit, Scholar is still an effective tool that provides social bookmarking and sharing from a personal/productivity tool, at the course level, and toward a knowledge sharing and construction perspective.
SMART OBJECTS – Items that are self aware have potential in education beyond the typical situations where you may find things like RFID tags and the like. Think in terms of signing out reference materials in the Library by merely walking out with them. Or perhaps paying for your food in the cafeteria by simply walking out of the lunchroom. Technologies that work for people, rather than the other way around could help for something as simple as reducing much of the time spent standing in lines. Blackboard and Sony FeliCa announced a partnership in this direction about a year ago.
Switching gears, but yet related to this 2009 Horizon Report are the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s Top Teaching and Learning Challenges for 2009:
- Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.
- Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual).
- Reaching and engaging today’s learner.
- Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.
- Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.
Combining and comparing the 2 reports, there is a common theme around reaching and engaging today’s learners using technologies that promote active learning, collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing. The importance of encouraging faculty adoption and supporting innovation in teaching and learning is becoming exceedingly clear.
Filed under: Articles, Work Activities | Tags: inigral bb blackboard socialnetworking sync coursefeed
Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a webinar session by Inigral Inc. which is a company that specializes in bringing social networking to education. The session I attended was called: “Lifecycle Engagement: Using Social Networking to Engage Prospects, Students”. What follows are some of my thoughts and notes from the session:
I enjoyed the session because I believe that social networking in and around education is becoming a requirement for educational institutions. My focus is on using social media in the classroom, but just as important are those students that are not yet part of the institution or those that have recently graduated. Taken from this perspective is a view that social networking can be used for the entire lifecycle of a student’s engagment with an institution. That is, the “wrap around” services that an institution provides (in addition to the direct classroom instruction) are as important as it shapes an overall student experience. Therefore, even those areas of a campus that are often considered as “extra curricular” activities such as student groups or organizations are important to the complete “education experience”.
Anyway, I picked up several good ideas and thought provoking suggestions from this session as Michael Staton did a great job of providing some background around social media and networking before jumping into some solutions that Inigral provides.
It was a good refresher that helped to underscore the importance of: images and video, mini-feeds of information, relevant and timely content, user generated content, interactive commenting, showcasing and marketing for awareness, and overall the building of online interactions and community through extending the campus into the virtual world. I thought it important also to do what Michael suggested in searching for what is already out there about your campus. If anything, it will give you a good indication of what the perceptions are of your campus, and what is important to students.
I thought that this slide was particularly helpful in how it breaks down the components of the life cycle into prospective students, enrolled students, and alumni.
Inigral’s Schools on Facebook solution seems to be headed in the right direction. If you are interested in learning more, Inigral is hosting another session (on March 4th) entitled “The Facebook Dilemma“.
While social networking and it’s use in education continues to grow and expand, check out GRCC on Facebook or as a student, get plugged in with Blackboard Sync and CourseFeed which are available now from GRCC’s Blackboard system.
