Schooled in Streaming

Many instructors felt that simply recording their lectures for online delivery would be their best use of the new technology. "What they often miss is the critical role that interaction plays in the classroom lectures they give," says Baron. "For example, I was invited by one of our lead faculty members to sit in on a lecture that she wanted videotaped and streamed. I counted the number of times she asked students questions or the students asked her questions. In a 50-minute lecture there were 42 interactions. In a streaming mode online these interactions, because of the asynchronous nature of our online courses, are lost, and we see a major decrease in the effectiveness of the instructional materials as a result. Thus, we are now working with faculty to incorporate interactions into their streaming content, using new rich media authoring tools."

Dual Use: Elearning and Communications
Like many education and training organizations, Marist College is trying to get dual use from its streaming system, using it for elearning (external and internal) as well as for communications (for both students and staff).

"We always like to leverage ‘academic’ technologies for ‘administrative’ applications whenever possible, as this is a key factor in improving ROI," says Baron. "Thus, we are looking at deploying our rich media authoring system for both distance learning and administrative training."

Baron cites a current pilot project that involves providing training for the college’s human resources office. All Marist staff members are required to go through annual sexual harassment training. Inevitably, some people don’t make it to the training sessions, creating a liability issue for the college. "So we got the HR director into a studio and captured what HR usually does in a workshop, and now we can deploy that video on-demand at any time to our entire faculty and staff," Baron says. The video training includes a quiz that users must retake until they achieve a satisfactory score. "This provides a documentation trail for us in case there is a legal issue. If there is, we can refer to a database showing that these people all went through training and were exposed to this information."

Marist has also used the IVT product internally to teach faculty how to use the college’s course management system. MediaPlatform worked particularly well for this task, says Baron, because it "provides the ability to build in hands-on practice into the courses. There are six skills the faculty have to learn, and for each skill they first get an overview, and then watch somebody else do it in a video, and then we load up a demo course and they practice that same skill. That hands-on practice we find is critical in getting people to feel comfortable with the technology. If they don’t practice it themselves, their retention rate drops and they end up calling for tech support."

No Magic Bullet
Baron and his colleagues are well aware that elearning is no miracle cure and that it can’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not a good fit for every learner, and even learners who are eager to try it often need to learn new skills in order to make it work. The college is implementing a Student Readiness Assessment for all students who are taking online courses. The web-based tool helps students understand what online learning is all about, and provides recommendations to students so that they know what technical skills they need to work on to be successful online.

"But at the heart of any meaningful learning experience is a dedicated instructor and solid instructional content," says Baron. "Without these, the learning experience, whether online or face-to-face, will not be very effective. Too often, the focus is on the technology—are you using the latest streaming media formats? Do you have all of the latest widgets in your course management system? The importance of the teacher and the course content are overlooked. This is why we focus a huge amount of resources in these two areas."

Baron foresees a time when the college will need to assemble all of its assets into one central repository. "We believe that content management is going to be a huge issue in the next decade. We need to begin thinking about the amount of digital content our faculty and students are going to be producing. And we’re probably going to want all that stuff to be accessible for years and years and years. At some point we’re going to have content coming out of our ears. And we’re going to need to be able to manage it effectively."

Seattle Community Colleges
The city of Seattle, Washington, is served by three community colleges, collectively known as Seattle Community Colleges (SCC). The colleges employ 2,450 people, including 1,627 faculty members, and together have an annual operating budget of around $154 million. Seattle Community Colleges’ streaming system is called the Internet Resource Instructional System (IRIS). While many streaming initiatives at colleges and universities have been spearheaded by the IT or the distance learning departments, IRIS is the offshoot of the colleges’ cable channel, SCC-TV (Channel 28).

Today, regular TV programming represents only about 10 percent of SCC-TV’s overall operations, says SCC-TV general manager Ross Davis. Most of what SCC-TV does now is internet distribution of educational media nationwide. "We’ve grown into a service for 77,000 public schools and 800 colleges around the country," Davis says. "We are an educational CDN."