Learning is at the tips of your fingers

Furthering your education can become another thing to juggle particularly if you work full-time. Griffith College is one of several third-level institutions helping students to overcome time pressures by offering lectures online.

Very often, people attending evening or part-time courses finish work in the evening and make a make dash through the traffic to get to lectures on time. If they get held up or the babysitter lets them down, they miss out. If they live or work outside Dublin or travel with work, things are even more difficult.

‘By providing online access to the lectures, we would save people travelling time, make further education accessible to people in remote locations and give people the flexibility to attend at times and in places that suit them’, says Gavin McCullagh an IT systems developer with Griffith College Dublin.
So how does it work? ‘The lectures happen on the Griffith College campus at the usual time for those students who can attend in person. A professional cameraman in the theatre records the lectures. For those who can’t attend, lecture videos go online that evening – usually an hour or so after- so people studying at home can watch. The videos stay online for the full term.’
Griffith College has a number of courses aimed at professionals studying in the evening or at weekends. Other courses prepare people for professional accountancy exams such as CPA. McCullough explains that to help revision, lectures are indexed by the topics covered. ‘So at a glace you can see that certain material was covered in a certain week, at X minutes into the lecture. If you want to listen back to that topic, one click and you immediately see that part of the lecture’, he says.

Alongside the lecture video, Griffith College also provides online access to the relevant pages of the textbook being covered, any handouts the lecturer provides, the homework for that weekend a homework solution and explanation video. ‘You submit homework online and it’s marked for you’, says McCullough. There are also online discussion forums for asking questions, debating issues and chatting in general. The system has been set up and running for three years now and so far it has worked well. ‘The feedback has been really positive’, says McCullough. ‘We see people watching lectures at all times of the day and from all over Ireland and abroad. People study at home, in work, hotels, cafes or any where there’s a reliable internet connection. ‘We’ve even noticed one or two people watching lectures on mobile phones. Support for iPad’s is next on our list.

Metroherald January 31st 2011 - eLearning with Griffith College Dublin

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