Case Study
Audio in an Asynchronous Learning Environment
As with any higher educational institution, the University of Advancing Technology seeks to engage students on a multitude of levels. In the Summer of 2006, however, the provost of the university was looking for an opportunity to engage both the online and on campus population. He detailed what he was looking for with the various deans of the institution and handed the task over to the Center for Learning Excellence (CLE) to implement. From here the objectives were clear, but the resources and technology needed to launch this were not.
What the provost had asked for was the audio capture of lectures on campus. He explained that many institutions had adopted policies requiring or recommending their faculty record their lectures and make them available to their respective students. UAT was also going to forge into these uncharted territories, but it was going to do so in its own unique fashion.
Determining the right tools
The CLE was then tasked to find the correct resources to make the recording of lectures available. Each course at UAT, whether resident or online, has its own course shell that is maintained and updated by eCollege. eCollege also stores the information, placing the onus on the faculty member solely for the content to be delivered to the student. One of the tools eCollege has is "Doc Sharing." Here, both faculty and students can upload any file to be used and distributed amongst the class. This seemed like a very logical place for the placement of recorded lectures.
After finding the place to house the information, the largest and most daunting task remained: finding a tool that was easy to use, portable, and would allow for quick manipulation of files. The CLE consulted with the university's IT department to help find such an item. A specialist in hardware and software was able to find the i-River T30, an MP3 player and recorder. The player is about 1.5 cubic inches, and it rests easily on a lanyard worn around the neck. It has six buttons and two input jacks (one for an external microphone and one for the USB), making it a very user-friendly solution. Two other characteristics that made it stand above the others were that it held more than 1 GB of data (about 73 hours of recorded audio), and it recorded the files in MP3 format, rather than a different medium that would have to have been manipulated in some way. Instead of making this a resource for just those faculty who were on campus, both the Provost and the CLE thought that the experience should be shared throughout the university, and, thus, these recorders/players were to be given to all faculty. Once the correct recording device was found, 80 of these were ordered and given to the Center for Learning Excellence to distribute.