eLcc November Meeting

The presentation for the eLcc meeting this month was by Jeff Luftig of CU Boulder, College of Engineering and Applied Science. Jeff teaches and leads the department with their distance program. Now when you read the last sentence that describes the program as “distance” you might think you would interpret that as simply online courses. Jeff explained that the courses they offer are not simply online courses. Basically the program follows a true HyFlex model design of a program. With a hyflex model students have a choice, on a daily basis, to go to the face to face classroom, to attend live synchronously from a distance, or to watch an archive of the class session. They are very careful to include student interactions and questions that come up during the live session, including students who are at a distance. This will get captured in the recording as well.

The department has a state of the art media equipped classroom. I was really surprised at how small the room was. We were in it for our meeting and presentation. It was big enough for about 20 students. But they said they had one very large room that would fit about 100 students as well. It would depend of the class that was being offered as they have a few courses that overlap and are shared with other programs on campus. So on a typical class day, the instructor would come in to the media classroom, fire up GoToMeeting to accommodate any participants that are at a distance. Next the instructor would start Tegrity, a lecture capture system. They mentioned that although they have Echo 360 to use as a backup they have been using Tegrity for several years and it has been very dependable. They hire student workers to run the cameras and audio etc. Each course has a shell in eCollege. All students, no matter how they registered are enrolled in the one course. Jeff mentioned sometimes they have ‘extra’ people in the course as well such as student auditors and students who register but take the course for free as a continuing education deal. The distance program has been very successful and the student evaluations are rated quite high for satisfaction. They said that 80% of the students will choose to attend as “distance” rather than face to face but it depends of the class. They might have on average 75 students enrolled in a course. The whole thing was really quite impressive!