San Antonio College Trains Faculty, Staff with Webcasts
San Antonio College (SAC) is using webcasting technology to certify its faculty members in counseling and to train call center agents. The 26,000-student community college implemented Sonic Foundry's Mediasite platform to develop an online video library of courses.
"We'd bring teachers in one Saturday a month to train and it was a lot of information. They would leave here and they had that feeling of 'Wow, how are we going to remember this information?'" Mona Aldana-Ramirez, director of retention support services for the college, said in a statement released today by the company. "We wanted to give teachers the ability to go back and review that training on their own. It has helped us tremendously on the operation side of the college to be able to train our people more efficiently without me having to go face to face."
Now when Aldana-Ramirez completes a training session, she gives teachers the link to the recorded webcast, which they can review on demand. The funding for Mediasite came from a technology grant for training science teachers.
The college is also using the recorded webcasts to train its call center agents. Before Mediasite, students calling for information had to endure long waits before they received assistance. Now, thanks to SAC's new team of call center agents, all trained via webcast, students can quickly get answers to frequently asked questions or routed to the appropriate department.
Aldana-Ramirez would like to expand use of Mediasite throughout the institution, for capturing lectures and for faculty advising. All on-campus faculty members will be trained and certified to help students enroll in classes. SAC recently received a Rich Media Impact Award in the Rapid ROI category for achieving a measurable ROI in its training initiative.
For more information on Mediasite, visit Sonic Foundry's Web site.
About the Author
Kanoe Namahoe is online editor for 1105 Media's Education Group. She can be reached at [email protected].