While campus-wide lecture capture solutions are now becoming commonplace in college classrooms, the 34 colleges overseen by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) have been ahead of the curve for nearly a decade.

The SBCTC provides leadership and coordination for Washington’s system of 34 public community and technical colleges. In this role, the State Board is responsible for everything from preparing a single system-wide operating budget and dispersing funds, to maintaining academic policies, establishing standards, and encouraging innovation among the colleges.

When Washington’s colleges are seeking a technology-enabled answer to a classroom need, they turn to the SBCTC’s eLearning & Open Education team. Through this collaboration, the SBCTC colleges have been able to leverage each other’s experiences and ideas to offer cutting edge classroom experiences before they reach institutions elsewhere.

Lecture capture was one of the first of the new tools the SBCTC eLearning team helped bring to Washington’s colleges, and the technology has already proven its worth. “We’ve seen amazing value in offering lecture capture as a resource for students,” says Mark Carbon, Operations Manager on the SBCTC eLearning team. “And we’ve seen that value equally across all our learning environments – in large institutions and smaller ones, in face-to-face classrooms and online ones, even in facilitating newer teaching techniques like student recordings and flipped classrooms – we’ve seen lecture capture technology put to great use just about everywhere.”

As early adopters in learning technology, the colleges of the SBCTC have discovered a simple rule of thumb in selecting new tools: great software is important, but great support is essential.

As a group, the SBCTC colleges had been customers of the Tegrity lecture capture system for the better part of a decade, and lecturers both in the schools’ in-person and online classrooms relied on Tegrity to capture and share their materials for student review.

Yet over time, the SBCTC colleges also began to notice a difference – and one that was amplified after Tegrity was acquired by McGraw Hill. According to Carbon, the schools felt they were seeing less and less investment in the Tegrity platform, and the quality of support users received seemed to falter. Several of the SBCTC colleges took to trying out alternative lecture capture solutions on their own.

Together, the schools decided it was time to formally put their Tegrity lecture capture technology contract up for review. Building from their original lecture capture RFP issued years earlier, the eLearning team added a handful of requests for new technical specifics – and a big emphasis on service and support. After scoring a very competitive proposal and detailed user testing, a new winner was announced: Panopto was the clear choice.

 

Find Out How Panopto Made the Change Fast and Easy — Download the Case Study Today

Partnering with Panopto’s industry-leading support team, the SBCTC was able to make the move from Tegrity to Panopto — including creating 34 new video libraries and converting 40TB of existing video — in just one month. To see just how they did it, download our new Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges case study today.