So it’s day two of the NERCOMP conference, and I began the day by attending a demonstration session of Tegrity. The title of the session was “Recruiting, Retention and Relevance (the 3Rs): Leveraging New Learning Technologies for Competitive Advantage.” The main presenter was Alan MacDougall, Director of Academic Computing at the University of New Haven.
Tegrity bills itself as a “class capture” solution. Essentially, it’s a system for producing enhanced podcasts of class lectures. To help illustrate the technology, this morning’s session is being captured by Tegrity, and will be made available for attendees to review after the conference.
Students already capture class lectures in the form of handwritten notes, and many record lectures on their own. Instructors speak at an average rate of 120 words per minute, but students write notes at the rate of 20-30 words per minute. Thus, students that don’t have good listening or note-taking skills can benefit from Tegrity’s ability to create a multimedia recording of a lecture.
During this presentation, I noticed a small tool bar at the bottom of the projected image. This seemed to be a recording indicator, and included a simple “VU meter” indicating audio recording levels. There were also buttons for pause and stop, and an arrow button that would appear to expand the toolbar to provide additional functionality.
Why did the U of New Haven choose Tegrity? The #1 objective was to improve student outcomes. Another concern was ease of use. The ability to create content that could be deployed on multiple platforms, including iPods, was a big plus. UNH began their initial deployment of Tegrity in Spring 2006. A campus-wide license model allowed for up to 2,000 users; they may soon exceed that limit and will have to pay higher licensing fees to Tegrity.
At UNH, Tegrity presentations are integrated into Blackboard. This helps control access to the content, and provides some protection on the distribution of intellectual property. Students can view the captured class in a web browser or download it to their iPod. They may also subscribe to a class’s RSS feed to have new lecture podcasts automatically downloaded to iTunes. The text on slides is searchable, and students can jump to just the section of a lecture that they wish.
In addition to class capture, UNH have used Tegrity in recruiting, to create training videos for students, faculty and staff, and for providing review sessions for students to complement class lectures.
Contrary to what one might think, Alan claims that class capture hasn’t had a significant impact on student attendance. If anything, he believes it has helped improve attendance (although he didn’t offer any specific numbers in support of this claim).
Tegrity has contributed to the growing number of “hybrid courses” offered by UNH. (A hybrid course typically refers to one that combines traditional classroom instruction with online instruction.)
Most faculty and students say they really like Tegrity; some say they love it. Students are more relaxed in class, as they realize they don’t need to be furiously writing down notes. Students can review material as often as they wish until they “get it.”
Screen annotations are captured as well as slides. Anything that appears on the display is captured, so a lecturer can use a web browser or any program and have the screen captured.
The size of an hour lecture capture can range from 40 MB to 150 MB or more. Files deployed for iPods are compressed to make the files smaller. Tegrity sessions can include external video, as well as video and animations embedded into PowerPoint.
After attending this session, I have a better idea about what Tegrity can do. I’m still not convinced of the cost-benefit ratio, especially in light of software solutions like ProfCast combined with the free hosting of iTunes U.