Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
How Students Use Video Recordings of College Lectures (Part 2 of 2)
Podcast Video | Posted by Phil Leigh on April 4, 2008
If you would like to learn how leading colleges and universities are using audio-visual recordings of professor lectures, this interview is for you. (Part 2 of 2).
Subject: Our guest today is Mark Jones who is the CEO of Echo 360. His company provides an electronic appliance enabling college professors to record their lectures for two purposes. First, is to make them available to attending-students on-demand so that they might review the material whenever desired. Second, is for use in distance learning so that students at any remote location, including their homes, may take classes from respected universities.Summary of Part 2: Part 2 of the interview discusses how Lecture Capture fits in the context of a college education. There are basically two uses. First, is for regular classroom students who want to be able to review the lectures repeatedly at their convenience. The second application is distance learning that enables students to attend classes even if they are unable to physically attend the college.
We also learn more about the background of the parent company, its growth, and venture capital financing. Additionally, our guest lays-out some of the credentials by showing a partial list of the 200-plus colleges using the system now. That is followed by a technical discussion of how Echo 360 works. We conclude with a question & answer session in which I ask questions that occurred to me while watching the PowerPoint narration.
Phil’s Take: I have not a shadow of doubt that the ability to replay audio-visual lectures would have been a significant aid to me in undergraduate classes like Calculus, Physics, and Electromagnetic Fields & Waves, among other technical fields. Often I found the material difficult to absorb in a single lecture and was never comfortable taking notes since the very act of writing the note might lead me to miss an important point that the lecturer was making simultaneously. As a result, it is not surprising that Echo 360 discovered students at the University of Massachusetts (Lowell) and Case Western Reserve made better grades in a chemistry class when audio-visual recordings of the lectures were made available on demand.
Moreover, since the recorded lectures keep more students enrolled, they tend to lift revenues for the Lecture-Capture colleges. Additionally, the schools can get added revenues from the lectures by launching online education initiatives enabling students from remote locations to be included.
Categories: Podcast Video
Tags: College Learning, digital media, Digital Video, distance learning, Echo 360, Internet video, Mark Jones, Phil Leigh
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