East Riding College in Yorkshire teaches future skills with the MediaCore video learning platform
Business leaders have warned that the UK is failing to close its "chronic skills gaps" by focusing on university education rather than vocational studies. The Tomorrow's Growth report by the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) recommends that more young people should be encouraged to take technical and vocational courses which should be comparable with academic routes.
One college that has seen an increase in popularity of its vocational courses such as hairdressing, motor engineering and IT has been attracting students using state-of-the-art facilities including an investment in the video learning platform MediaCore – a tool used to collate, curate and share video enabling students to watch and re-watch lectures at their leisure .
East Riding College (ERC), a further education college located in the East Riding of Yorkshire, has two main sites in Beverley and Bridlington which are 25 miles apart with a smaller campus in Kingston upon Hull and caters for more than 1500 full time learners and 7000 learners overall. It runs a variety of shorter 10 week courses as well as work based training and apprenticeships.
e-Learning Manager, Nathan Cobb explains how the video learning platform has simplified adding, distributing and accessing teaching materials across its ICT platform. Nathan also talks about the benefits of accessing media from mobile devices in classes.
Nathan wanted to increase the use of video in the college due to demand from educators and learners, “I was finding that there was a growing call for it in the college,“ he said. “We were however being held back on account of the limit on the amount of video we could upload to the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and the time it took to upload it.”
Nathan was given a demonstration of MediaCore at the Future of Technology in Education conference in October 2012.
Nathan explains, “I had a good look at the system and there were quite a lot of things I liked about it such as the Moodle integration and the simplicity of managing user accounts. The iPad app which allows us to upload videos was also a key selling point as we have nearly 100 iPads in the college and we could see a real benefit for our vocational courses.”
Nathan had been looking to increase the use of video around the college for some time and needed a streaming media platform to do it.
“The platforms I had looked at had some different functionality but they were expensive for a place of our size,” Nathan recalls. “MediaCore scales to our size and is a good solution for what we wanted.”
Dedicated server
ERC has been encouraging its staff to use video but has been restricted in the size of video it can add to Moodle, its Virtual Learning Environment.
Nathan said, “We have a 50 MB upload limit to Moodle so previously we would have had a problem if an educator had uploaded a 1 GB video and asked students to stream it as it would have slowed things down. Now it is coming off a streaming server there is no load on Moodle and this takes away the barriers to using the technology.”
Previously, Nathan would have looked to see if the content was available online.
“We sometimes get DVDs from an industry supplier so I would look to see if that supplier had the video on its site so we could stream it from there. MediaCore is nice as all the content on there is staff quality assessed so that when students look at videos there are safeguards and nothing distracting, which could be the case on other video platforms such as YouTube.”
Moodle plug-in
MediaCore provides an interface to Moodle that educators and students can use to easily upload or find a video without having to go anywhere else.
“The latest plug-in to Moodle is very good”, Nathan explains. “I can’t speak highly enough of it. It focuses on the practical aspects of getting the video into Moodle easily. Using the iPad app, staff can create videos on their iPads or iPhones and upload them directly to the platform.”
Vocational videos
Nathan recognises that video is valuable in a vocational context as it helps reinforce practical skills and is a great resource for both educators and learners.
He said, “I access video all the time on my mobile to find out how to do things such as sort out RJ45 cabling and it is excellent to see this kind of learning being used a lot more in the college. “
One development in the use of video in the college is the use of QR barcodes which students can scan with their mobile devices and access information on the server.
Nathan said, “The mechanical engineering department has started using QR codes in the motor vehicle workshops. The students can scan the QR codes and get the technical specification documents for a car’s engine for example directly onto their phone or iPad.
“The ability to hand a student an iPad or ask them to watch a video tutorial on their phone is powerful in a class where you have 20 learners and one teacher. We are also able to collate resources from other areas such as YouTube and Vimeo which has the advantage that they do not need to go to a different site to view the content.”
As part of ERC’s educators professional updating programme Nathan ran 1 hour training slots to take them through the process of uploading.
“Now one of our IT tutors creates tutorials on how to install Windows 2008 or how to connect up an RJ45 cable with voiceovers which learners find useful and he finds easy to do. He does things in class and afterwards he can direct students to the resource. It is excellent for our vocational courses.”
Increased engagement
The video platform is making it easier for staff to engage with technology as they no longer have to ask Nathan to upload the recording.
Nathan said, “We often find that if the technology is easy to use then the staff are more likely to engage with it. Before, uploading the videos would be a time consuming process and the 2 GB limit would also be a barrier and now all I have to do is tell them where to upload it. Students are used to creating and uploading content and are quite comfortable learning from the videos.”
ERC has had a continued rise in usage and added content and an increasing number of tutors saying they want recording capabilities.
I want to see continued growth in staff generating content and that will come by helping people understand that it is a simple process and it does not matter if it is not professional quality,” Nathan said.
Benefits
ERC is saving time on the process of uploading the video to the server, Nathan said, “We can make content more quickly and take far more ownership of it than we could before. The educators can upload it and we get an email to check we want to publish it and the process takes 5 minutes. Previously we would have to upload videos through the server and then upload it to Moodle. It saves lots of time.”
ERC invests regularly in technology to keep up to date with the latest advancements and gets a lot of positive feedback from learners.
Nathan said, “We invest in technology and we feel it pays dividends but the biggest challenge is trying to develop consistency across the entire organisation. MediaCore helps with this consistency as it is easy to use, works across all the different platforms we use such as Moodle and the iPads and is a real benefit in terms of supporting learning.
“It also gives us greater security and more flexible control of the content that the learners are accessing as we can be comfortable that all the content on there is for educational purposes only. “
Staff assessments
Staff at the ERC also use the platform to upload presentations for assessment purposes and can ensure that content is only visible to the staff member and the internal verifier.
Nathan said, “This is something that they have not been able to do before and the simplicity of recording on the iPads, uploading and storing the videos makes it so easy. Previously we had a network limit on the amount of content that staff can upload to their account which becomes an issue when using video but MediaCore takes that problem away.”
Future plans
Nathan has had conversations with MediaCore about developing video editing within the environment so the user can shorten the video and insert simple slides.
Nathan said, “We have only had the system since December 2012 so we have lots of plans for it and I will continue to work with MediaCore to add any additional features we may need. There is also a move to try and create video content in the hairdressing and beauty department as they have had the training sessions and they use the iPads quite a bit.
“We have areas such as the motor vehicle department using videos and moving forward we are looking to work with others that are proactive in using video to help build content and to encourage other staff. In Humanities they are keen on recording historical documentaries so they have been requesting to add those on to the system.”
Nathan concluded, “I do think it’s a good product. I have had a couple of Skype conversations with the support based in Canada and I can’t speak highly enough.”
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