Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Study
Can Classroom Capture Boost Retention Rates?
10/17/2007
Results from an initial study by a professor at Coppin State University in Baltimore indicate that class capture technology that allows students to view lectures online after the fact can improve course retention rates and grades.Chris Brittan-Powell, a psychology professor at Coppin State, developed the study to see whether using technology from Tegrity helped student grades and retention in his courses over a semester. Tegrity's Campus software can make lectures available at any time to students by automatically capturing, storing and indexing each class for replay over the Internet.
Brittan-Powell stressed that the data are preliminary, since they focused on a single course; Coppin State may expand the study to have a broader, university-wide focus. "But [Tegrity] does seem to have a big impact on retention," he said. "I didn't think the correlation with grades would be as strong as it ended up being."
Like many colleges whose populations include working students, Coppin State would like to improve retention numbers for many classes; drop rates can average around 30 percent for some courses. In the study, Brittan-Powell found that his face to face classes with no recorded lectures offered after the fact averaged a 71 percent retention rate; when he offered lectures in class and online via Tegrity, that boosted the retention rate to 83 percent, in effect nearly cutting the drop rate in half.
Brittan-Powell compared face to face classes both with and without classroom capture to evaluate its impact on grades as well. He found that students in face to face classes that used Tegrity as an enhancement received slightly better grades than those in classes not using Tegrity. That's probably because with face to face classes, he speculated, students receive the benefit of both live and online resources. Students in classes that used Tegrity for distance learning tools scored about the same grades as those from Brittan-Powell's proximate classes.
The professor undertook the study because, he said, he was curious and somewhat skeptical about the benefits of class capture technology in general. Coppin State, an urban residential liberal arts university with some 4,000 students, has used Tegrity as a class capture tool in conjunction with its content management system, Blackboard, since 2005. This spring, Coppin State had 76 courses taught with Tegrity, and 41 instructors recorded at least some of their lectures with the product.
One often asked question regarding offering recorded lectures online after the fact is the affect on attendance in the classroom. However, Brittan-Powell's study showed that classroom attendance in capture-enhanced courses either stayed the same or increased. "We thought that there would be a ... negative effect on attendance," Brittan-Powell admitted. "But perhaps it goes along with retention." He said that students were more encouraged to continue to take a class after missing a lecture, since they could catch it online later and were thus likely to fall behind. And, he emphasized, the study seemed to show that students "don't decide to blow off class just because, 'Oh, I can get on Tegrity.'"
Recommended Reading
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
- The Quilt Coalition Rolls Out XO Communications for High-Capacity Network Services
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
- Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
- Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
- Cognos Releases BI Software for Linux-based IBM System z Mainframe
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
- Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
