Educause Core Data Service 2014 reports the average central IT budget spends $906 per student each and every year. That adds up to $10.3 billion annually, according to the Center for Digital Education. Fantastic! Our classrooms are flush with technology that are all changing teaching and learning, right? Not so fast.

Integrating technology into teaching and learning is hard work – often taking years to find the ideal balance. Franziska Moser noted that providing support is often a key factor in helping instructors add more technology in their classroom1:

“If an institution’s stated strategy is to promote the use of educational technology, that institution must establish an adequate framework for faculty to use technology successfully. This includes not only formal incentive structures but also the development of a sufficient educational technology infrastructure and a satisfactory framework for educational technology support.”

There are nearly 1.2 M employees at institutions in the United States focused on instruction2. That’s an impossible number of instructors to support on technology every year. This leaves many institutions scratching their heads: is the investment in lecture capture worth it if they can’t ensure that instructors to use it? There is another option. Let the technology itself help instructors adopt.

That’s the secret behind Echo360 lecture capture, part of the Active Learning Platform. It’s been made so simple for instructors, they don’t need to change how they teach. Here’s how the typical instructor adopts Echo360:

1. Just Say Yes

It can’t be said enough: make technology so easy for instructors they don’t even need to think about it. For lecture capture, this means no clumsy workflows in the classroom.   Once they agree to be captured, everything happens behind the scenes. No fumbling with computer connections, cameras or microphones. It just happens. Recordings start and stop without any action on the part of the instructor and are automatically sent to their students. That’s the beauty of scheduling in Echo360. Hands free, no added work.

2. Teach As Always

Some of your instructors maybe ready to take another step. Most professors teach with PowerPoint in the classroom – don’t change that. Imagine sending out slide material to students without leaving PowerPoint and knowing that students can take notes and view slides alongside the lecture video? Echo360 lets instructors do just that. Now students have lecture capture, slides and digital notes in one place and professors have still changed nothing.

3. Engage

For the early adopters out there, there is more an instructor can do to get more teaching value out of capture.   Inserting a few digital questions and polls engages students, while giving instructors a near-instant assessment tool. The data is presented in simplified dashboards, providing very actionable feedback. Professors can choose to take this added step, or simply continue to capture alone. It’s up to them.

Thinking through instructor adoption is important when selecting a lecture capture solution; it determines how much the technology will be used by instructors and whether or not your school and students recognize immediate ROI and learning benefits.

1 = Faculty Adoption of Educational Technology by F.Z. Moser

2 = US Education Department National Center for Education Statistics