I love hearing stories about colleges that use every resource available to provide education to their neediest–and busiest–students.
Unfortunately, these stories rarely come from traditional four-year institutions. After all, they aren’t in business to provide low-cost solutions.
But the community colleges rock. They tend to have a closer link to those who are working jobs while working on their degrees, and they are getting very innovative about the way they offer education to those who may be challenged by time and distance.
This story from Campus Technology news is a great example:
A feisty online program director on a rock-bottom budget at a Los Angeles college is using free cast-off computers and help from an open source software startup to create podcasts of classroom lectures.Los Angeles Trade-Technical College is the oldest of nine public two-year colleges in the huge Los Angeles Community College District. Nearly half of its students work more than 30 hours a week and all students commute to the college, whose main campus is near downtown LA. For many students, English is a second language.Linda Delzeit-McIntyre, an instructor at LATTC and its online program director, decided in 2006 to launch a pilot podcasting program. Listening, she explained, is clearly a primary skill for many LATTC students. “We’re in the inner city,” she said. “Many of our students speak one or more languages, but they don’t read or write well in any of them. That means they have learned by listening.”
Delzeit-McIntyre first scrounged some used low-end computers discarded when a local county courthouse upgraded. Preparing the free computers was no easy task–Delzeit-McIntyre painstakingly hauled them from a warehouse, a few at a time, in the trunk of her car. Many had bad power supplies, hard drives, or other components; were infected with viruses; or simply didn’t work.
Still, she was committed to providing a solution for her students. She got the computers fixed up, and then:
She teamed up with Chris Dawson, CEO and president of Box Populi, a Portland, OR-based [Yay, Portland!] software startup that offers a simple open source software product that can turn virtually any computer, including very old or low-end ones, into dedicated podcasting appliances.
I love it.
Having lectures available by podcast means students who miss a class can still get the information they need, and those who attend can listen again if they need help remembering the material covered.
The reality is that there is a tremendous amount of waste in industry and institutions, and with a little ingenuity and a willingness to patch together various solutions, creative educators can find ways to enhance learning without spending a fortune.
There are plenty of educators as passionate, creative and committed as Linda. I hope this story inspires them, and I’d like to think that even those who have a fat budget for such things might discover a way to re-use something in an innovative way instead of tossing it out with the trash.
Cheap and savvy saves the day–again.
