The Covid-19 pandemic has hit businesses hard and has also presented new challenges for business owners and managers to overcome. One of the most demanding logistical challenges has been keeping your team engaged while working from home. How can we make sure that our team hasn’t switched off due to Zoom overload and receive so many emails that look like spam?
The greatest pre-invention to these challenges was most certainly remote conferencing tools, like Zoom, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, and the plethora of others available on the market, but these also have brought their challenges.
Calling all daydreamers
Studies have shown that 9 out of 10 people daydream their way through any meeting that lasts longer than 35 minutes. Does this then mean that meeting hosts have to repeat themselves continuously? Was the one key action point that had to be completed by the end of the week missed?
Damn, no one told me it was John’s birthday on Thursday; I wanted to send him a box of beer… (we did!!).
We all know where I’m coming from when I list the points above, but we’re missing something. How are students coping right now? It’s impossible to ignore the news, University after University going into full lockdown. Lecturers are scrambling to deal with how they’re going to deliver their next lecture while maintaining engagement. Students wonder how they’re ever going to make up their tuition fees from studies that aren’t even happening anymore. If 9 out of 10 people daydream their way through meetings, how many students are daydreaming too?
At Echo, we’ve been focusing down on the student experience right now. We don’t want our future entrepreneurs, nurses, doctors, architectures, and engineers to be left behind because technology and tools that are so focused on business applications are forgetting our most important future.
Introducing the future of lectures, with Echo. We’ve thought about the entire experience – from lecturers delivering their classes to students being able to review, take notes and make use of all of the content that is droned to them for hours and hours every week. And what does that look like when students start using Echo during their lectures? Engagement increases significantly… why? Because we give students a choice. We don’t ever want lectures to stop; we hate the idea that instead of your favourite lecturer talking to you, sharing their views and opinions, you receive a presentation deck with the content that was covered. You lose context, rich content, emotions, thoughts, discussions, and time!
Let’s look at the average numbers:
The average number of lectures per week: 9 (9 hours)
The average number of tutorials per week: 3 (3 hours)
That’s showing 12 hours of lectures per week, now with a majority delivered digitally. For 9 out of 10 students (unless they’ve mastered the art of note-taking and documentation), they’re only absorbing 60% of the lecture content.
Hours of additional study per week: 18
On average, students spend just over 50% of their study time revisiting lecture content, including notes, documents, and diagrams. Sticky notes? Doodled notebooks? Frantic typing on Word docs usually with so many spelling mistakes that they no longer make sense as they were trying to keep up? The reality compared to well documented, structured notes.
In using Echo, students save approximately 2 hours every week. Previously spent writing up their revision notes on countless sticky pads, scanning through sheets and sheets of crumpled up paper and calling their mate next door asking for the lecture presentation that they accidentally put in the recycle bin. Echo also drastically free’s up the time revisiting lecture content! Echo empowers students; and gives lecturers the experience back, Echo gives you time, it’s a real student companion.
If you’re a lecturer at a University, you’ve thought about what video conferencing tools you’ll be using to provide your lectures remotely. We don’t want Echo to get in the way of that, so we’re entirely software agnostic, meaning that we work with every and all video conferencing tools so that you can continue to give lectures to your students remotely. The Echo Widget allows them to track, record, segment, and note-take on generated lecture content during a lecture presentation. The content is then delivered into a beautiful dashboard safe and stored when revision time comes around again. The content is transcribed, along with the captured digital content from the lecture. We also want students to share, which is super simple in Echo — allowing students to send their captured lecture content to their classmates that may have missed a section or the entire lecture altogether.
The best part is that Echo is 100% free for students, now and forever. Echo allows Universities to continue to deliver rich lecture content and enable students to continue to experience their University course as they should do and make them SO much more productive.
If you’re at College or University and want to give Echo a try for your digital classes and lectures, head over to getecho.ai
Oh, and because we’re saving you from buying notepads, we’re planting one new tree for every new user on Echo into the destroyed rainforests… because we care about the planet too!
