LectureCapture.com: Continuity Planning: Lessons Learned from Colleges Around the World - LectureCapture.com

Continuity Planning: Lessons Learned from Colleges Around the World

The hot topic we’re seeing from colleges and universities today is continuity planning. Regardless of your opinion on the hype surrounding swine flu (aka H1N1), campuses around the globe are using the possibility of a massive outbreak as a platform to discuss, create and share their emergency plans for everything from a weather emergency and a pandemic to terrorism. Here are just a few of the “best practices” that are seeing emerge from our customers surrounding the use of lecture capture for continuity planning:

• Don’t Delay: train faculty and staff ahead of an emergency or campus closure!
One of the top questions we’re getting from clients and non-clients alike is how long will it take you to deploy for us if we find ourselves in an emergency situation? Installation is just part of the process to get an institution ready for lecture recording; faculty readiness is also key.

After Katrina and the 2008 flooding in the Midwest, Echo360 approached multiple institutions to offer teaching support after the emergency. The schools were able to accept a donation from us, but were not able to leverage the full benefits of having a lecture capture solution during the closure for the simple reason that their instructors weren’t equipped and trained to do so. Regardless of the tool you are using, get instructors up to speed on lecture in anticipation of a problem.

• Review and consider amending institution capture polices to allow for the creation of an “academic content archive”
The very idea of recording lectures has created controversy on many campuses. Faculty are concerned about their intellectual property, classroom attendance and even “Big Brother” when allowing classroom recording. We’ve found that many of our client institutions make lecture capture optional, i.e. faculty opt in to be recorded.

When planning for a campus closure, institutions like Curtin University in Australia are reviewing this policy. This is especially true for classes operated in auditoriums where high numbers of students attend daily. Curtin has established a catalog of content that can be exposed to students in event of a pandemic, terrorism or weather emergency.

• Practice Teaching Online:
This is definitely one of the more creative preparation activities we’ve heard, this time from the National University of Singapore. NUS is operating weeklong distance learning drills. In this case, face-to-face teaching is suspended so instructors can spend their time practice delivering class via the institution’s preferred technology tools.

•Use in conjunction with other academic technologies
Most of our client institutions distribute rich media Echoes via Blackboard, iTunes U, Moodle or another portal. Enabling the automated upload and publishing feature that Echo360 offers takes the manual publishing steps off faculty and your technology staff as both of these groups maybe working remotely. Anand Padmanabahn, CIO of NYU Stern, "By pairing lecture capture with our course management system, we have a powerful, end-to-end method to create, publish and provide student access to academic content in an interface already familiar to our faculty.”

Have additional best practices from your university? Please share with the rest of the lecturecapture.com members.