Course Development at Wentworth Institute

LIT successfully launched it’s first Course Development at Wentworth Institute June 6th-8th, 2017! Eleven faculty and staff journeyed through an intensive hands-on process to create a course map using a backward course design model that aligns objectives with assessments tools, assignments, and course delivery methods. Charlie Wiseman, co-chair of the Institute Curriculum Committee, provided ICC guidelines and facilitated a robust Q/A dialogue. Cidhinnia Torres Campos, Director of Institutional Effectiveness, shared how her team supports outcomes assessment and rubrics. LIT is revising the 3-day institute based on valuable feedback from participants. Look for an offering in Fall and Spring!

Deepen Student Engagement in Lectures with Interaction with Echo360 June 13th 2017

Eight faculty participated in a workshop to learn how to engage students in presentations and lectures while gathering analytics on what that engagement looks like. Students can respond to embedded polling, flag slides they have questions on, submit questions, and take notes in sync with your material. Feedback was very positive. Look for another offering of this workshop in late September.

This Fall 2017 semester the Learning Innovation and Technology group is conducting a comprehensive assessment of the overall video needs at Wentworth.

To begin the process, we sent faculty and staff an email and link requesting your participation in our anonymous video needs survey.  Your responses to this survey will help us evaluate the effectiveness of our existing and future resources so that we can continue to support your teaching goals.

The survey is very brief and will only take about 5 minutes to complete. The survey is available from July until the middle of September so that we can obtain feedback from all faculty and staff.

At present, LIT provides two solutions to support video usage: Kaltura Capture Space and Echo 360 Personal Capture/Active Learning Platform.  Both of these solutions offer integration with our enterprise Learning Management System, Blackboard Learn.

Our current analytics indicate that overall adoption of video on campus is growing.  We also understand that needs vary, including how video is being used and features that would enhance the overall user experience.  Going into the 2018/19 budget cycle, we want to purchase the suite of tools that best service your needs.

As we continue the assessment, we will conduct a student survey. We’ll follow-up with focus group interviews to dig a little deeper into our video needs and invite select vendors to campus to demonstrate their products and services.

Students, faculty and staff will be invited to attend the vendor presentations and will play an active role in assessing the strengths and limitations of each product and help select the successful vendor and future direction of video usage at the institution.

Why Video?

The use of video in education is certainly not a new phenomenon.  In fact, video has been used to support teaching and learning since the 1960’s (Wainhouse Research 2012).

For an intriguing look at the evolving state of video in education, we invite you to view the 2016 State of Video in Education Report by Kaltura.  This report sheds light on current findings of how video is permeating our educational institutions and transforming the way we teach and learn.

In a compelling TED Talk filmed in 2011, Salman Khan, creator of the well-known Khan Academy describes the transformative nature of video and how he and his team at Khan Academy had envisioned using video to reinvent education (20 min).

It is with that spirit in mind that we continue to investigate the growing use of video to help teachers teach and students learn.