Media Methods: LSU and Tegrity (NSD)

LSU Expands Distance Learning Program Through Online Learning Solution

Article Link: http://www.thejournal.com/articles/15796_1

Dr. Thomas Lynch, a professor of Public Information at LSU, had a problem. He wished to begin integrating and expanding his lecture materials outside the normal classroom to better engage his students in the learning process. While LSU did provide support for hosting files online via BlackBoard and SemesterBook (a LSU in-house developed program) for students, there was no option for streaming media of any kind due to costs and other technical reasons.

Enter Tegrity, Inc. and their WebLearner program. After a brief demonstration at the LSU campus, the WebLearner program proved that it could “dramatically reduce the time and effort required to record audio and video in sync with the classroom PowerPoint presentations...it also delivered high-quality, indexed modules, at connection speeds as low as 28.8K, which was deemed essential for practical, inexpensive viewing by all of their students.” WebLearner impressed LSU, and they bought this new learning system.

Dr. Lynch immediately grabbed hold of this new technology, and “produced more than 100 online modules in less than half a semester without any production assistance or technical support from the university, except for their assistance in placing the files on a special server.” Soon after, Dr. Lynch developed a plan to utilize this new technology and hopefully prove its effectiveness to his administrators and his classroom.

Dr. Lynch developed a system of choices for his students as they started a new semester:

1. He could continue lecturing the class as he had always done, and the students could use the recordings optionally for review purposes.
2. He could stop lecturing, and students could rely solely on the Tegrity files.
3. He also gave each student the option of either staying for a live lecture, or leaving after the first 15 minutes and viewing the recording at their leisure.

Within two weeks, the third option proved to be the chosen one.

The results indicated that “by the end of the semester...the grades for the first semester when we used Tegrity were slightly better than when we took the traditional approach.”

I found this article to be a positive approach where an instructor took the bull by the horns and sought to improve both his students' ability to learn, and at the same time, improved his own technological skillset and notions of technology and instruction.