The Echo360 Community Conference Europe event, entitled Education Unconfined, took place last Wednesday at the London School of Economics. I went along, with Labhaoise Ni Dhonnchadha, to find out about the new release (version 4.0) and to network with other users.
We have been piloting Echo360 for lecture capture at NUI Galway for the last couple of years, with 5 installations in lecture theatres and seminar rooms.
We were very impressed with the venue, the New Academic Building (NAB) at the LSE. It is bright and airy, with lots of space. The view from the 8th floor was stunning.
The event itself was successful, with lots of exciting new features in version 4.0. We especially like the contextual collaboration for students, along with usage trend reports for instructors. The delegated admin capability is also very important for us, as we contemplate scaling up.
There was an excellent session from Jeremy Speller and Andrea Sella from University College London, where there are 20 lecture theatres equipped with Echo360. I liked Andrea's image of lecture capture as a time machine - offering the possibility for students to go back and revisit those parts of a lecture that were unclear. He made it particularly clear that students do not see recordings as a replacement for a lecture. His talk finished up with some interesting questions on how/where lecture capture can make an impact: performance, attendance or experience? And how can we measure this effect?
Inspired by Doug Belshaw and his use of Storify to document conference attendance, I've put together a small story myself, using my tweets from the conference and a couple of photos I took.
