Overview

Picture a thriving community college with four campuses, huge enrollment and a high demand for new and different programs, and you have Tulsa Community College (TCC). TCC is using rich media technology in creative ways to tackle some of its many challenges, and the results are outstanding.

Nursing Program’s Critical Need

Back in 2005, TCC faced an urgent mandate: train more nurses to address the healthcare shortage. The dilemma was that most students needed unique flexibility – they worked full time and had families at home, so availability for class time was limited. Simply adding more sections of current classes was not an option, so the school turned to lecture capture technology.

TCC’s Distance Learning department installed Echo³⁶⁰ into six classrooms to record course lectures and make them available for web download. So instead of attending class at a certain time, students log onto Blackboard when they are available and watch it from their computers. Video and visual aids are synchronized together, and students have the freedom to pause, fast forward and rewind the material.

The Word Got Out

News spread of the nursing program’s success, and other departments wanted to use Echo³⁶⁰ to supplement their live and distance learning classes. In response, TCC put the technology in an Innovations Room, allowing training sessions, guest speakers and other applications to be created. Instructors have discovered how easy it is to just go in and produce a learning module.

TCC’s Speech Department has adopted Echo³⁶⁰ in four classrooms and is using it in innovative ways. Students make presentations, then instantly review and evaluate themselves. They love the immediacy of working on the fly, and there’s virtually no learning curve for them.

Loren Farr, TCC’s Manager of Media and Interactive TV Courses, attributes the rising demand for rich media to changes in student behavior, “We are in middle of an iPod generation – people want to have access and are used to streaming video. They are going on YouTube, so they’re comfortable going to the Blackboard site to click up a learning module.”

New Technology, New Pedagogy

The rollout team encountered some faculty resistance to change at first. Technology, no matter how much easier it makes something, is often met with fear. They dealt with it head on, mainly through hands on training and time for people to see how it worked.