Northampton Community College

Northampton Community College (NCC), located in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley is unique among community colleges in the state. It is the only community college in Pennsylvania to offer on-campus housing and serves more than 35,000 students a year with the programs they need to enter the workforce or to continue their studies. Offering degrees in more than 100 fields, the student body at NCC is diverse in terms of age, ethnicity, income, and academic interest. To meet the needs of this diverse student body, NCC encourages the use of video and active learning in its programs. In 2016, as part of a competitive proposal and bidding process, NCC selected Echo360 as its enterprise-wide academic video platform.

Video Technology to Manage Learning Content and Integrate with the LMS

“We selected Echo360 over 4 other vendors and there were a number of factors that went into the committee’s decision,” says Joe Scocozza, NCC’s Academic Technology Coordinator. “First and foremost, the system had to be fully featured and reliable. And, like most community colleges or small institutions, we don’t have a large administrative staff to work on implementation. So, the fact that Echo360 can be quickly deployed and is integrated with our Blackboard LMS, means that our faculty members can easily set up their courses and begin using the system. Finally, we were looking for a solution beyond Blackboard that could serve as a content repository, where faculty could create, store and manage not only academic video, but other content such as classroom presentations and other material related to the courses they teach. Combined with the support Echo360 provides throughout implementation and beyond, I see Echo360 supporting our teaching and learning needs for many years to come.”

Creating Opportunities for Student Assignments and Peer-Learning

As NCC expands its use of Echo360, Scocozza envisions that faculty members will quickly move beyond using Echo360 as a content repository and classroom presentation tool.

“There is a real opportunity for instructors to create peer-learning environments, where students can learn from each other,” says Scocozza. “For example, in some of our marketing classes, students have to create ‘real-world’ sales presentations. These presentations can easily be recorded by students themselves, uploaded into Blackboard, and then their classmates can review and provide feedback and comments.”

Video Capture Bolsters “Hands-On” Learning in Nursing Program

In NCC’s Licensed Practical Nursing and Registered Nursing Programs, Scocozza sees even more opportunities.

“We’re building a large simulation classroom facility for our LPN and RN programs. It’s a real-life clinical and hospital setting with tremendous opportunity to use video and engagement tools for hands-on learning. For example, an instructor can demonstrate the correct way in which to administer a specific medical procedure and we can use Echo360 to capture that. Students can then review the video capture on their own, practice it, and then when they are ready, record themselves performing the procedure. The instructor can review it to make sure these future nurses are performing correctly, but the video will be available for other students to learn from as well.”

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