The 21st century classroom no longer has four walls. Thanks to current technology, a professor has the potential to teach students anytime and anywhere provided they have a device that supports video playback. Professors who take advantage of this technology gain significant benefits in reaching more students and keeping them more connected to what’s going on in the classroom. A content delivery system such as TikiLIVE makes it easy for professors to achieve these benefits at a manageable cost.
Fit Your Course Into Any Schedule, Any Location
Professors who leverage video technology in their classes, such as live streaming and recorded view-on-demand lectures, make it possible for students to enroll in their classes who might not otherwise be able to: full-time workers, parents, the mobility disabled, and others who need flexible schedules. A content delivery provider makes it possible for students to keep up with their classes asynchronously, without having to be tied to a university-set schedule. For traditional students, streaming audio or video of class lectures can give them the flexibility to succeed in classes while fitting them into a schedule that works for them, all while avoiding traffic and parking hassles, overcrowded computer labs, and uncomfortable classrooms.
Archive Your Lectures and Other Course Media
Your students lead busy lives, and for many, success in your course means being able to go back over lectures at a time that fits into their hectic schedules. Others may want to review lectures they already attended to reinforce the material or study for an exam. TikiLIVE makes it easy to archive audio and video files of your course lectures for students to view or review on demand.
With TikiLIVE’s cloud-based encoding, your video content is rendered for playback on virtually any device, including computer desktops/laptops, tablets, smartphones, even channels you can create for set-top boxes such as Roku. In addition to live and recorded lectures, TikiLIVE can host your course’s supplemental audio and video materials as well, making it possible for your students to watch a video you’ve selected for the course without having to switch away from the context of the course material.
This archiving of course lectures and materials can aid student retention in your classes, as students won’t feel penalized for missing a lecture and can easily go back and review material they may have missed, rather than resigning themselves to never catching up and dropping out of the course.
Host Guest Lecturers Without the Airfare and Hotel Bills
One of the most exciting parts of being a university student is getting the opportunity to learn directly from recognized experts in the course subjects. Before video streaming technology, a professor’s ability to invite guest lecturers to speak to their classes was constrained by the campus’s location, by the speaker’s travel schedule, and by the department’s budget for covering the speaker’s travel expenses. A content delivery system such as TikiLIVE removes all of those barriers to hosting first-rate guest speakers for your class; TikiLIVE’s mobile broadcasting feature makes it easy to broadcast live video from the speaker’s location without any specialized equipment on the speaker’s end – all they would need is a smartphone or tablet and a 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi connection.
Professors who adopt the TikiLIVE platform in this way can also use it to attend virtual meetings and give guest lectures in other classrooms themselves. Hosting guest lecturers give your students a sense of the “real-world” applications of your course material and are a great way to strengthen your students’ connections with the subject. TikiLIVE makes these connections happen without the travel hassles and expense.
Integrate with Social Media
Like most people today, students spend time connecting on social media – not just with their friends, but with their interests as well. With so many students already comfortable with and spending time using Facebook and Twitter in their daily lives, it just makes sense to integrate those tools into a course to generate discussions and share ideas. TikiLIVE includes a comprehensive set of tools for creating a presence across social media for your course and facilitating student and faculty interaction. Create Facebook and Google+ groups and a Twitter feed for your course, and TikiLIVE allows you to update all of these social feeds simultaneously to reach all students at their preferred social media sites.
You can also highlight videos from your archive by posting them to YouTube and embedding them in Facebook posts or tweets. TikiLIVE also includes a live chat feature where you can set virtual “office hours” and respond to your students’ questions and concerns, as well as a message center where you can host threaded discussions about the course’s subject matter. These tools also foster camaraderie among your students and can facilitate their creating study groups or setting up one-on-one meetings, regardless of their location.
A Powerful Education Tool at an Affordable Price
To all appearances, your university may appear to have deep pockets with its well-funded sports teams and new building construction, but the reality for academics is often that you’re expected to continue delivering a world-class educational experience in the face of ever-shrinking operating budgets. TikiLIVE enables you to reach greater numbers of students worldwide without investing in specialized video equipment or pulling together disparate recording, streaming, playback, and social-media components, while greatly reducing your department’s travel expenses. TikiLIVE seamlessly integrates all these components under one virtual “roof,” at a price point that is well within most budgets.
Let TikiLIVE Help You Connect with Your Students
With TikiLIVE as your partner in education, you give your students more options than ever before for connecting with your courses – and with each other. We also give you first-class support to help keep your content delivery system running dependably to its fullest capabilities.For more information on how TikiLIVE can work for you, give us a call today at (305) 289-4557 or fill out our online contact form. We look forward to helping you create and run your 21st-century classroom.
