Inspired Learning Through Classroom Management Software

Classroom management software that gives an accurate snapshot of how students use asynchronous classrooms

Management software that can measure how average students make use of online resources such as recorded lectures offer instructors a good look into how students most effectively learn. A teacher has a platform and students take notes as much as possible during that time, but is that enough? With Blauvelt and Driskel’s study, we learn that the number of reviews their lectures receive may indicate that students need to view content numerous times in order to retain the information effectively. By recording their lectures in EchoVideo, they are able to use features in Echo360 to indicate how many additional views their lectures are receiving and other information to help them learn detailed information about what is drawing students to review their lectures once or multiple times. Learn more by reading their interview with Echo360’s Jeff Peterson.

Jeff Peterson: Welcome to EchoCast and welcome Clarkson University’s Instructional Design dynamic duo, Erin Blauvelt and Loretta Driskel. Erin is the Managing Instructional Designer at Clarkson and she has spent a career in instructional design and consulting in both academia and business. Loretta is the Senior Instructional Designer at Clarkson and has also spent quite a prolific career helping individuals and teams in a variety of educational settings unlock their learning potential while, in her own words here, while walking the tightrope balancing the student success with class management efficiency. I picked that off of Loretta’s LinkedIn page. And if anybody wants to go to a really cool LinkedIn page for a lot of inspirational little nuggets, check that out.

Anyway, we’re excited to have both Erin and Loretta here today as 2022 Echo360 e3 Impact Grant Award winners and to have them share the work that they are leading at Clarkson to more accurately and statistically measure the learning impact and outcomes of EchoVideo, the E of Evidence in Echo360’s e3 formula for inspired learning. They have a great plan and a great vision to help all Clarkson’s students regardless of location or ability to learn equitably and to be engaged fully through the use of EchoVideo and their other technologies that they employ. The work that they’re going to be doing, to put an even finer point on what impact looks like, will no doubt be instrumental as they continue to walk that tightrope that Loretta talks about. So welcome to EchoCast, Erin and Loretta.

Erin Blauvelt: Thank you.

Loretta Driskel: Thank you, Jeff.

Jeff: And thank you for sharing your work here on EchoCast. Before we hear more on the plans that you have to get literally statistically precise of the impact here, which is really exciting, even some of us creatives can geek out on the numbers, so that’s fantastic, let’s get some background. Clarkson’s been working with Echo360 and the EchoVideo platform for quite a while now. Maybe just talk a little bit about the origin story of that. How did you come upon using video learning? You’ve both had long careers in instructional design, so maybe talk about how this whole relationship started from the beginning.

Erin: Sure. I’m going to say about seven years or so ago, Clarkson University acquired Union Graduate College in Schenectady, and upon that, we brought in a number of graduate courses that were online courses. Previous to that, Clarkson University on-campus in Potsdam, New York, did not really have many online courses. So once we acquired all of those courses, we needed a way to have videos, both videos recorded for asynchronous courses, where the students did not attend weekly in a Zoom session or something like that, but also to host live sessions. We would host them in Zoom actually. At that time it was Adobe Connect. We’ve since moved over to Zoom. Those had to be posted someplace. So we decided to use Echo360 as the media server. Before using Echo360, we really didn’t have a set way. We had some YouTube channels that were shared and private YouTube channels and things like that. So Echo360 has really brought all of that together. Then over the past few years with Covid, it’s really brought to the forefront the use of Echo360. We’ve had a lot of instructors, even just face-to-face instructors that had never used Echo360, didn’t know what it was, even though as an institution, we’ve had it for a while. So that really has upped our usage and promoted it. There are many more instructors who are using it now that they got a chance to try it in the last few years.

Jeff: You know, Erin, we were talking before we started the big show here about how you’ve got a neat perspective because you did your undergrad work at Clarkson years ago and now you’re back. If you think back to being a student at Clarkson, what was the state of ed tech, using technology in a classroom to do what you’re doing now—is what you and Loretta are doing now, is it a continuation of something that’s always been part of the Clarkson DNA or is this representing something new? And obviously, Covid changed the complexion for a lot of universities, but what’s the difference working now at Clarkson in the space now as a leader in the space versus when you were a student years ago?

Erin: Sure, sure. I guess without revealing my age, there were no LMSs or anything like that when I was there. Clarkson is a technical school, so naturally there’s IT students and degrees and the program that I was in was technical communications, which was technically based. I had instructors that were using technology but not in a really organized fashion. I had one instructor who had his own set of servers and I learned to write HTML on those servers, but it was all very piecemeal. Instructors that wanted to integrate technology could do that, but there was really no organization or no consistency to it at all really. That’s one of the biggest things is that now we’re very consistent. Every class uses Moodle. Every recording is on Echo360. There’s just a lot more organization.

Jeff: And I would imagine just the fluency that you find at the instructor level and the student level. I don’t want to date myself either, but at the first job I had, I actually shared a computer on a lazy susan with a cube-mate. So we’d spin it whenever we wanted to work on it, so crazy. Nowadays it’s this idea of infusing the classroom with technology, it’s actually a bit redundant. Both of you have had long careers in instructional design. When you talk about video and how Clarkson and Echo360 came to know each other through a posting of video content, how has video, specifically, evolved over the years for each of you in terms of how you see that medium factoring into your instructional design plans?

Erin: It provides us a lot more opportunity to give students a whole host of things that weren’t available years ago just because instructors didn’t know how to record things. I actually, as a student, worked in a small video production lab, where there were some graduate courses that had a couple students away on coop or internships. So the class would physically come into that studio. The instructor would lead it. We would record it. And those students that were at coop could watch it later on in the day. At that time, that was a big use of technology. That was a super cool thing to do. And now it’s just so easy. Instructors can do it from anywhere. It’s simple to use. But I think one of the things that we’re trying to get at with this project is the importance of having videos available to students. We have prerecorded videos, those lectures, but then we also live-cast in-person classes. Not all of them. It’s up to the instructor whether they want to do that or not. But I can’t imagine how much that would have helped me as a student years ago. Live lecture classes. Huge lecture halls with 150 or more other people and I had trouble absorbing the content that was being taught to me. If I had had video recordings of lectures, I would have gone back to my room in a comfortable setting and rewatched those things. I would have used them to study. That’s a huge difference. That’s something that students now have that years ago they didn’t. And that covers equity in students that may have disabilities. That helps students who English is not a first language for them because Echo360 has the transcription feature. It’s something that, through our grant program, we’re really trying to promote the use of this. To convince instructors that, hey, you should be doing this if you have the opportunity to. That’s been a big change, I think, over the course of the last few years. That live broadcasting and then recording those live lectures and making those available to students.

Jeff: I do think, as you mention, and what we all appreciated about the application that you all submitted, I think that for many, it may be early on in the video learning days. The value of video may be one of convenience. Well, I couldn’t make it, so now I can watch it later. But I think that what you’re doing there at Clarkson is really understanding and appreciating is that the way people learn, the way people need to absorb content, myself included, I need to watch things, I need to re-read things, and so I’m only as good as my notes in a live setting. So it’s not just a convenience place. Oh, yeah, I can watch it later. Actually, the whole point here is to get the learning outcomes that are desired. That medium itself, where it’s viewed, how many times it’s viewed, the annotations and things like you say. It really has put a lot more texture around the use of video beyond just, oh, yeah, I can watch it later because I missed it. What has been the response from students at Clarkson with it? Has it become just a little bit like we were saying earlier? Is it just par for the course now that people kind of expect it or are you finding, has it evolved over the years and are you finding students appreciating it maybe in a different way than even a couple of years ago?

Erin: Our online classes rely on it very heavily. We have some classes that are synchronous that do meet week by week, but those are graduate programs, they’re working adults, they can’t always make it, so they need to watch those recordings. Then some of those courses are asynchronous, meaning that the instructor will prerecord a lecture. So for online classes, this is really vital. For our undergraduate face-to-face classes, that’s what we’re trying to find out through what we’re doing and collecting data and seeing who is using it, how often are they using it. We want to determine whether students that are going to their lectures live are then going back and reusing these things. Right now we don’t know that. So that’s one of the things that we’re trying to hit at, and differences between who is using it. Undergraduates versus graduate students. Students in large lecture halls versus small discussion-based classes. There’s a lot that we’re looking at to really figure that out and how much students are needing that. But we want to do that through use. We could survey the students, of course, and that may be something that we do down the line to find out, but we want the data to drive future decisions that we make.

Jeff: Another very appreciated element of your grant proposal was just that. I think sometimes we can rely on anecdotes. Oh, the students love it, it seems to be working great. Then you check the box and move on. So talk a little bit about, you don’t have to get too much into the weeds here, but the kind of rigor that you’re putting against this. I mean, bringing in a statistician and really getting into some real empirical evidence. Talk just a little bit how this kind of double click is really going to help put a finer point on the impact.

Erin: Sure. We know that we can go—we’ve always been able to go into a course and see some general statistics on the usage of the videos for that specific course. But what we’re doing is drawing out, we’ve got a giant spreadsheet now with a whole lot of data. My team, we don’t have a whole lot of background in statistics. That is not my forte. As I’m getting into this, I’m finding it more interesting. But we’ve pulled a lot of data out of the Echo360 system of what the usage is. There are a lot of different columns to our spreadsheet. We’re trying to pinpoint what we’re really trying to get at. An example of that is, we had a conversation a few weeks ago about the polling tool in Echo360. There aren’t very many of our instructors that are using that. So we had to throw that data out because we don’t have a lot of comparisons for that. But we’re going now and adding information in. So we are trying to compare just class by class, but also groups of classes. So like I had said, the data that we’ve pulled from Echo360 doesn’t indicate whether the course is a graduate course or an undergraduate course or whether it’s a 100-level course or a 400-level course or whether it’s an online course versus a face-to-face course. So those are the things that we’re working on filling in now. We’ve hired a student statistician to go through and do data visualization. She’s working with an instructor who’s a statistics professor. They’re going to do their magic and give us some trends. We’re looking at trends. The first step is really to compare class by class and see what the trends are there. And then the second step later on is going to be looking deeper into some of those classes and looking to see whether there are differences in who’s watching this. So can we tie this to grades? Are the students in the classes that are receiving better grades also the higher video viewers? Are there more males than females watching these videos? A whole lot of stuff that’s more related to the student and maybe not the class itself. So we’re sort of taking a two-tiered approach with that and seeing where the grant money gets us in the time we have to work on this. But we’re trying to set this in motion so that we can do this again in the future so that we can track year-by-year the usage and how it’s increased or changed.

Jeff: That’s fantastic. And it’s not only so helpful for folks in your field, in instructional design, when you guys all get together at your conferences and talk shop and you can share it. But I also think when you talk about that extra layer of detail around, whether it’s gender or age or whatever, or maybe even subject areas, that for the instructor him or herself, in actually designing the course and figuring out—to just have that data early on, I think, would be super helpful. I can’t wait to see what you guys learn.

All right, we’re at the last little section of the bit show here. So we call this Inspiration Point. And Loretta, I’m giving you a heads-up here. I’m going to ask you the same question, so you’ve had ample time now to get a really good answer ready here because you’ve been very politely silent in the background. So here’s the question. We end every EchoCast asking our esteemed guests for the one key point or one lesson that you’ve learned throughout this process. It’s a fairly extemp question and you can answer it how you want. But we kind of want to get it down to one point that you want to leave our viewers here with, whether it’s, if they’re embarking on a similar initiative or just one kind of thing to grow on. So Erin, we’ll have you answer it first and then Loretta, we’re going to end with you. With some big, big answer. We’re just setting you up here. We’re expecting great things. 

Erin: No pressure, Loretta. Hopefully she thinks of something different than I have. I think for me, it’s that, especially in a research-based institution where data is very valuable to instructors, we want to use that data to prove some points and help to market the tool in the future. Help to really find out how students are using it, why they’re using it, in order to help instructors in the future decide whether they want to use it or how they want to use it. Data can be a very powerful thing. We don’t want to just give people advice and say, this is what Erin says or this is what Loretta says. This is what the data is saying, which hopefully backs us up on the things that we always say. But we’re really interested to see what trends we come up with. Hopefully we do have some trends. Hopefully we do have things that are happening. 

Jeff: Fantastic. All right, Loretta, what is your Inspiration Point?

Loretta: Okay, so it’s similar to Erin’s Inspiration Point, of course. She and I think a lot alike. Down the road, we hope to be looking at those polling and other engagement tools. We had to throw that data out this time, like Erin said. Not enough people used them. We’ve really not even had a chance to train faculty that have Echo as this tool. We kind of threw it at them during Covid and they had to use it because that’s the only way that they had to get their lectures across. And now, going forward, they don’t have to use it. We want to show them why they might want to use it. So this is a good start, to say look what’s happening in this class. Moving forward, this could be happening in your class. And then also, you might add in this, and give this a try. That would be down the road, but hopefully there’ll be another grant down the road. 

Jeff: Well, we know people. We can set that up. Anyway, well, thank you so much, Erin and Loretta, for being here today and sharing your plans for Clarkson. We are very proud to partner with you overall and in this specific endeavor and we can’t wait to see the increased impact. And thank everybody for tuning in, whether you were live here or you’re watching this asynchronously, maybe a couple of times, just to let it sink in. You can check out more episodes of EchoCast and a lot of other material on Echo360.com and we look forward to supporting your inspired learning goals as well. 

A great classroom management system can enhance student learning 

The critical information learned by Erin Blauvelt and Loretta Driskel is an example of the important work the Echosystem does for organizations worldwide. Whether it’s providing asynchronous copies of lecture material to students or statistical data on views to the instructors, Echo360 solutions take classroom data collection to the next level. Request a live demo to learn more.