Active Learning Blog

Technology in the classroom seems cutting-edge, but is it really an effective way to teach students, or are educators simply jumping on board the latest band wagon? The best place to test new teaching technology is in one of the least personal classrooms - the large lecture class on a college campus. In 2013, Associate Professor Brent Stockwell took his 180-student biochemistry class and flipped it. His results, which Campus Technology recently reported, showed the potential for technology in the classroom.

The Ara Institute of Canterbury (formerly Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology) is leading the pack when it comes to using innovative technologies to offer more flexible, active learning to prepare more than 5,500 full-time and part-time students for sustainable careers. 

Does your institution have a lecture capture solution? Or, are you considering investing in lecture capture now or in the future? If either case is true, we’d like to let you in on a little secret. Lecture capture technology by itself is not enough.

The flipped classroom has taken the education world by storm, but nowhere is this model more useful than in the vocational education setting. TAFE and VET institutions across Australia and New Zealand are turning to the flipped classroom to prepare their students with the skills and experience they’ll need to succeed in their vocation of choice.

Students learn by doing, particularly in vocational training for trades in fields such as Construction or Hospitality, which demand the mastery of a wide range of practical skills. Flipping the class using Echo360 video familiarizes students with crucial content and how-tos before class so they have more time to immerse themselves in real-life, hands-on learning during class.

Rachel Latimore, Senior Lecturer at Christchurch Polytechnic has experienced excellent results since she began using Echo360 to flip her classes. She notes, “I know that if I’m teaching content, probably a quarter or a third of the class might understand it. Other people need to go away and have time to process it. So, the advantage is as they arrive, I can see that they will watch that with Echo360 and they actually all have had time to process it. So, it’s much quicker to get into that deeper level of learning.”