UK Echo 360 Users' Conference

Just returned from the Echo 360 Community event hosted today at the University of Birmingham. If you’ve not heard of Echo 360, it’s the automated lecture capture / streaming system that’s just been introduced here at Loughborough and piloted by History in a Semester 1 module (see screenshot). Across UK HE the system has now been adopted by numerous institutions, with some now rolling it out in a big way.

If you’ve not seen the system, the prospect of being captured might seem rather unnerving, and many academics will have concerns around the potential impact on attendance if lectures are made available online.

But the consensus, among UK users I spoke to today, seems to be that where it’s been introduced, it’s not affecting attendance and may actually increase engagement. Rather than viewing captured lectures as an alternative to physical attendance, students seem to appreciate the Echo streams as an aid to revision, and typically navigate to specific sections of the lecture rather than replaying it in its entirety.

Here at Loughborough our second system is being installed in T003 early next week, with plans to extend this to 8 teaching spaces for the start of next academic year. We’re now starting to look at what sort of staff development we need to provide, as well as guidelines on effective practice.