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Students Are More Engaged, Confident

At first, Professor Janet Casagrand, Senior Instructor in the Department of Integrative Physiology, thought her recorded lectures would be helpful for students who needed to miss class. She had been meeting with them after the fact to share what they had missed and had good reason to think Classroom Capture might help improve her efficiency. While a small percentage of students did use the recordings to make up class, Janet was pleased to find many students who had attended class were also leveraging the recordings:

...so many students use it as a review tool, and they find it invaluable, and even if they’re fast forwarding through most of it, they like to be able to go back, check their notes, a particularly difficult concept--to listen to it again...

Fearing that students wouldn’t come to class if lecture recordings were available, Janet ran some statistics and didn’t see any drop in attendance. Wisely, she had incorporated active learning with clickers in her class to deter that possibility. It turns out that it’s not just the few who must miss class or request accommodation that are accessing the recordings. Classroom Capture enables all students to reinforce their learning:

When there were parts I would miss, it would allow me to go back and clarify. It helped me confirm the notes I had taken with what the professor actually said.

It helped me go back and review certain concepts and topics that were challenging the first time around.

There are many distractions in lecture (e.g., students on their phones, laptops, students talking) that can make it difficult to pay attention or hear everything in lecture. Lecture capture has allowed me to go back and review things that were missed, in an environment without distractions.

While Classroom Capture is just one of the technologies that can help students succeed, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) has been working hard and fast to launch two new services in preparation for remote teaching and learning this fall.

Teaching and Learning Effectively Through a Pandemic

During COVID-19, instructors will likely be teaching using a hybrid modality. Each of the following services has functionality to facilitate hybrid teaching and learning: 

Classroom Capture Service with Zoom

Instructors should consider using the for asynchronous recording in conjunction with for synchronous teaching to allow students who are not on campus to participate. (On-campus students can benefit by rewatching lectures if they should need to.) If you’ve already used Classroom Capture, you can reactivate previously-recorded lectures for use at a later date.

Personal Capture Service

Interested in recording lectures outside of the classroom? You can use OIT’s newest service, , which allows you to create high-quality videos, screencasts, and slideshows anytime, anywhere--like in the comfort and safety of your own home.

Like Classroom Capture, Personal Capture offers features like easy sharing and distribution as well as viewing analytics for instructors, dynamic picture-in-picture playback and searchable content for students. 

Remote-Capable Classrooms with Zoom

To help accommodate the need for hybrid teaching and learning, up to 350 additional classrooms are being converted to (RCC) this summer, which allow for in-person, real-time remote participation in conjunction with . The RCC Service provides instructors with a simple technology solution, a Crestron Mercury X system, that enables the simultaneous delivery of lectures to students that are physically in the classroom as well as students learning remotely. Please note, this system must be used with a BYOD ("bring your own device") laptop to facilitate the Zoom (synchronous) session.

A full list of hybrid-capable classrooms can be found on the .

Teaching will certainly have its challenges this fall, but with these OIT services, instructors have access to technologies that can help make their students’ experience the best it can be.