Effectively Engage Students in an Online Course with PlayPosit
Transform your course into an interactive experience
El Centro College is a community college of the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) in Dallas, Texas. The College offers over 100 unique, fully online courses in a variety of core educational courses along with continuing education and workforce education courses.
The Challenge
The instructional technology team at El Centro Community College is focused on achieving 2 big goals this year.
- The first is to move as many instructors as possible to OER (Open Educational Resources) to make courses affordable and accessible for all students.
- The second is to promote hybrid/flipped learning in a way that allows instructors not only to offer these types of courses, but excel at structuring them.
Christina Jones, Instructional Designer and Educational Technologist expressed, "Students do not have money to buy $180 textbooks, and when all students don’t purchase the textbook because it is too expensive, you are teaching at a deficit and students are learning at a deficit and nobody comes out a winner."
The Solution
A key step in moving courses to incorporate OER is to create or find videos to replace the lectures faculty deliver in-person. With PlayPosit, faculty at El Centro "get engaged with content that is not locked in a textbook" says Christina. It is especially empowering for instructors when they have the opportunity to make choices about the content they embed in video and to present that content in a way that is interactive and engaging.
In a hybrid/flipped learning environment, there is a sequence of activities that students are required to complete before class. In these cases, video is essential and PlayPosit is key in providing accountability and feedback on understanding, which instructors need to maximize 1:1 live interactions with students.
The Result
PlayPosit enables online/hybrid course instructors to seamlessly transition lectures and activities to an online environment, by allowing them to deliver content that is active and hold students accountable.
Christina measures PlayPosit success by how many courses (peer-reviewed and having passed a checklist for quality) are being run without textbook fees. Furthermore, she looks at enrollment numbers and improvements in retention to measure impact.