Responding to Students’ Expectations at King’s College London
Despite being one of the oldest universities in England, King’s College London is as modern as it gets when it comes to providing a world class learning experience for its students. To meet the demand for 24/7 access to content from today’s 21st century students, King’s College has leveraged Echo360 active learning technology to improve their ability to capture, access and analyze learning interactions and resources, such as lecture recordings. The Echo360 platform is built on native AWS cloud services to achieve a true multi-tenant solution that scales seamlessly and automatically.
Students Want to Replay the Learning Experience
King’s College London, known for its cutting edge medical research and world renowned law and medical faculties, has been using Echo360 for many years in many departments, most notably in the traditionally lecture-heavy Medical and Bioscience programs.
“Echo360 allows students to review and revise any concepts or course material that they need extra time to understand,” explains Dr. David Byrne, Director of Technology Enhanced Learning from the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine.
At the time, students who did not have access to Echo360 began to ask for the same facilities and soon a swell of requests started to gather.
“When we asked students what we could do to enhance their experience of education, lecture capture was right at the top of the list. So we decided we had to respond quickly,” said Professor Karen O’Brien, the university’s Vice-Principal of Education.
Improving Student Outcomes and Clarity in Learning
Recognizing the importance of student engagement both inside and outside the classroom, in the beginning of September 2015, King’s College London began the rollout of the Echo360 active learning platform to the entire student body.
To date, the platform has been installed in 150 classrooms, and more than 700 classroom presentations are captured within the Echo360 platform each week. Students have embraced the technology for:
- Learning on demand: Students at King’s College can access all their lectures for essential revision of content via their learning management system within an hour or two after the live lecture.
- Innovative study tools: Some students use previous years’ recordings to prepare for the current year’s lecture.
- Student engagement: Students are reviewing course content and materials 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
With more than two-thirds of King’s law students coming from countries outside of the United Kingdom, this type of review has been particularly helpful, as students for whom English is not their native language can replay class discussions as often as necessary to ensure understanding of course concepts.
Moving forward, King’s plans to use the Echo360 active learning platform to promote more interactive learning experiences for students including blended and flipped learning approaches and in class student response activities, like polling.
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