In this section: |
EchoCenter is a convenient, intuitive dashboard for both students and Instructors. On this single page, users find:
Deploying the EchoCenter helps Instructors get the most out the university's investment in the Echo360 blended learning solution. Although you might still want to publish individual links of Echoes and supplemental materials (and this method, "individual link publishing" is still supported), the EchoCenter page is automatically created for each section and offers a better experience.
EchoSystem also provides the ability to embed the EchoPlayer for individual echoes into external websites or an LMS page, allowing users to view the echo with the full EchoPlayer functionality.
See Deploy the EchoCenter below for details on how to implement the EchoCenter.
See Train Academic Staff to Use EchoCenter Pages below for suggestions on how to help Academic Staff get the most value from this feature.
If you use RSS feeds with integrations, consider using an EchoCenter page instead. It provides a much better interface for students and instructors. You should still use RSS feeds for podcasting and iTunes U. |
This procedure shows how to deploy the Collaboration Service version of the EchoCenter, which we recommend. See Best Practice - Deploy the Collaboration Service Version for details of the advantages offered by this version.
Follow these steps:
LDAP Authentication (if you are not integrating with BlackBoard or Moodle). Be sure to configure LDAP, ensuring that students and Instructors are correctly identified. If you do not, Instructors see the standard EchoCenter page and do not see valuable teaching aids. See Enable LDAP Authentication.
Optional: Customize the user experience via ESS configurations. You can, for example, add your school's logo to the EchoCenter pages. See Enable EchoCenter Pages in the ESS.
Optional: If you use an LMS other than BlackBoard or Moodle, you can embed the EchoCenter page URLs in that system. See Enable EchoCenter Pages in a Learning Management System.
Although you can deploy either the standard or Collaboration Service versions of EchoCenter pages, we recommend that you deploy the Collaboration Service version, which has optimized views for both Instructors and students. In addition, if you are integrating a Lecture Tools system with EchoSystem, you must use collaboration services and set up user authentication for EchoCenter access.
The Instructor view helps Instructors teach better by offering several teaching aids:
The student view helps students learn better by supporting discussions and bookmarks.
The unauthenticated view has none of these helpful features, as shown below:
When you deploy the Collaboration Service version of EchoCenter and a user's credentials are authenticated, there are two different views of the EchoCenter page:
The Instructor view looks like the figure shown below:
The Instructor view offers most of the functionality of the student view, lacking only the course notes (bookmarks) pane. The Instructor can also see several teaching aids:
See EchoCenter for Academic Staff for details on the Instructor view.
Students do not see the teaching aids in the Instructor view. The student view of a Collaboration Service page looks like the figure shown below:
From this page students can:
View recent discussions and join the discussion. Clicking on the discussion link opens the Echo at the relevant scene.
The Recent Activity section lists the most recent discussions that occurred in any Echo for this section. If the most recent Echo did not elicit any discussion, no discussion link is listed. Discussions sometimes occur as students review the Echo. As students submit discussions topics, they are listed in this pane. |
See EchoCenter for Students for details on the student view.
A view is defined as any continuous viewing for a given user and a given presentation with a 10-minute timeout. This means that if the user comes back into the presentation within 10 minutes of the last time they viewed that presentation HEMS will log that as a single view.
Usage data (heatmap data) is sent once every few minutes to the server as the player is running. If the session does not exist HEMS registers the new session and logs the view. These view numbers are now used for all calculations returned from HEMS for view stats.
HEMS divides the presentations up into segments for analytic reasons and keeps track of how many times users cross segment boundaries. To get the average completion, HEMS returns to EchoCenter the total number of segments viewed divided by the number of cumulative views of the presentation. EchoCenter then uses that number to calculate the % viewed, based off the total number of segments for the presentation.
The accuracy of this is highly dependent on the length of the presentation. The EchoPlayer does not send data up to HEMS on every segment viewed. It accumulates them and sends data on timed intervals just like google analytics does. The timed interval is dependent on the length of the presentation. For presentations less than 50 minutes, it only sends data once every 1.5 minutes, with segments at 15-second intervals. So let's say, the presentation is only 2 minutes long and the user views the 2 minutes and then closes the browser. In this case, only the first set of stat data would be sent by the EchoPlayer and therefore, even though the user watched the entire presentation, the second chunk of data was never sent and EchoCenter will only see about 50% of the presentation as viewed.
Think Before You Conclude. If a student shows low numbers for the first six parameters listed (Unique Views, Cumulative Views, Completion, Last Viewed, and Date Viewed), you might conclude that she is not engaged. Before drawing that conclusion, look at the Downloads parameter. A student may have downloaded many Echoes and be diligently viewing them, but these activities will not be reflected in the first six parameters. Is the Student Using a Mobile Device? If usage information is not appearing at all for a student, or minimal usage information appears, find out how the student is consuming the Echoes. The EchoSystem collaboration service is not able to collect information from mobile players at this time, so those views are not being tracked. This is slated to be addressed in a future release. Why is the Data Skewed Like That? When a student views an Echo via the full EchoPlayer (via desktop or laptop), the EchoSystem Server (ESS) can collect the parameters listed above. When a student downloads anEcho, or views an Echo from a mobile device (phone or tablet), communication with the ESS is hindered and no such data can be collected. Because it is not collected, the parameters for the student are low. Therefore. Consider the Downloads parameter and mobile viewing possibility before drawing conclusions about a student's engagement. |
When a user's credentials are not authenticated, the user sees the standard version of the EchoCenter page, as shown in the figure below:
The standard EchoCenter page lacks useful features for both students and Instructors:
The Collaboration Service version has optimized views for both Instructors and students. See Deploy the EchoCenter. |
You will need to show Academic Staff how to: