Tulsa Community College Redefines Nursing Education With Echo360 Lecture Capture

DULLES, VA--(Marketwire - May 7, 2009) - Echo360, higher education's first choice for reliving the classroom experience on demand, today announced that Tulsa Community College has increased access to nursing education in Oklahoma by recording thousands of lectures with EchoSystem campus-wide lecture capture platform.

The U.S. is projected to have a nursing shortage of more than one million registered nurses by 2020. But in 2007, over 30,000 qualified applicants were turned away from nursing schools due to faculty shortages. This predicament led Tulsa Community College to adopt an innovative solution for expanding online course delivery and blended learning programs for nurses.

Loren Farr, manager of media and interactive television courses at TCC, explains, "There is an increasing demand for rich media, and Echo360 makes it easy for us to create it. It's cost effective for us. We don't have to reinvent the wheel."

Before Echo360 appeared on Tulsa Community College's campus three years ago, the nursing department manually recorded, downloaded and streamed each individual classroom video. With the process requiring several days to complete, this outdated method was no longer sufficient.

Today, the lecture capture trend has spread beyond the nursing program to all five campuses at Tulsa Community College, and the school currently supports a distance learning enrollment of more than 10,000 students each semester.

"Lecture capture is not limited to distance learning; it's much more than that. It has become mainstream. It's not a tool for distance learning, it is learning," continues Farr. "It helps us adapt pedagogy to accommodate the learning styles of today's students."

Faculty from other departments access Echo360 in the college's shared "innovation room" to record course modules. These "easily digestible" captures are supplements to traditional lectures, distance learning courses and noncredit workshops. Some faculty members distribute learning modules across disciplines, while others mix and match the modules to reuse in future semesters.

"Lecture capture technology makes it possible for professors and students to do more with less," said Mark Jones, president of Echo360. "Echo360's scalable lecture capture solutions enable colleges to develop distance learning programs that keep pace with students' needs for flexible course delivery."

About Echo360

Echo360 envisions an opportunity for every student to be freed from traditional barriers to learning with an on-demand education experience. Full-time, part-time, distance, continuing, and online all describe today's student living in a 24/7 world. On-demand media and education converge at Echo360, helping colleges and universities engage students on the students' terms with full and unbounded access to classroom-based content via multiplatform replay. Developed in partnership with the University of Western Australia, Echo360 means scalable and affordable lecture capture solutions that can provide institutions of all sizes with universal availability of lecture content.

Contact Information: Contact: Mary Young Director, Marketing, Echo360 (703) 963-2467