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Tulsa Community College Captures Nursing Lectures with Echo360

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 05/13/09

Tulsa Community College in Oklahoma has gone public with its use of EchoSystem's Echo360 for lecture capture. The college, which has been using the application for three years, is hoping to increase access to nursing education in Oklahoma by recording thousands of lectures. The software captures voice, video, and visual aids; allows the user to publish to a course management system, iTunes U, Web portals, or via RSS feeds; and then lets the student view the recording through a browser or on an MP3 device.

"There is an increasing demand for rich media, and Echo360 makes it easy for us to create it," said Loren Farr, manager of media and interactive television courses at the college. "It's cost effective for us. We don't have to reinvent the wheel."

"Lecture capture is not limited to distance learning; it's much more than that. It has become mainstream. It's not a tool for distance learning, it is learning," Farr added. "It helps us adapt pedagogy to accommodate the learning styles of today's students."

Before Echo360 was widely deployed, the nursing department manually recorded, downloaded, and streamed each individual classroom video, which required several days to complete.

The use of lecture capture has spread beyond the nursing program to all five campuses of the college, and the school currently supports a distance learning enrollment of 10,000 students each semester.

Faculty from other departments access Echo360 in the college's shared "innovation room" to record course modules. These "easily digestible" captures are supplements to traditional lectures, distance learning courses, and noncredit workshops. Some faculty members distribute learning modules across disciplines, while others mix and match the modules to reuse in future semesters.