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Faronics Insight and Lewis and Clark Community College
Background
Lewis and Clark Community College is a two-year community college located in Godfrey, Illinois, approximately 30 miles north of St. Louis. As a leading educational institution in southern Illinois with an annual enrollment of more than 12,000 students, Lewis and Clark Community College prepares students for four-year colleges and universities. The college also serves the community by offering comprehensive educational opportunities and rich cultural experiences.
Lewis and Clark has approximately 2,000 workstations deployed campus wide across twenty-eight computer labs. Supporting this information technology infrastructure are six IT personnel, two of whom are Denise Erwin and Princess Baehler. Both are Computer Support Specialists at Lewis & Clark, and are responsible for maintaining all computer hardware, software, and peripherals. They also provide help desk support via email and phone, and are responsible for sourcing out new hardware and software products to meet the needs of the college. One day, while searching for Deep Freeze updates on Faronics’ website, Denise came across Faronics’ classroom technology management software, Insight. After reviewing Insight with Princess, they both knew they had found the solution to the problems the technology instructors were battling. "Having computers integrated into the curriculum is a critical part of equipping our youth with job-ready skills."
Problems That Teachers Were Facing
“Before we started using Insight, we faced numerous problems in our computer labs,” says Mary Lou Watson, an Internet Course Technician and Part-Time Instructor at Lewis & Clark Community College. ”As instructors, we constantly endured student mouse click activity while trying to teach the class. Instead of paying attention to the course material, students were surfing the Internet.”
When the use of the Internet was required as part of the curriculum, instructors also faced difficulties. “Having all the students in the class open their browsers and visit a particular page on a website sounds simple enough, but as with many things it’s easier said then done,” says Georgia Voils, another Internet Course Technician at Lewis & Clark Community College. “Whether it was having the students open a website and then navigate through to the required page, or try and have them type in a complex URL, both left too much room for error and confusion. It was very frustrating for instructors to have limited class time wasted on trivial matters such as this.”
Another issue that Lewis & Clark experienced was that students were afraid to ask questions during class or an exam. During class times, students often felt embarrassed putting up their hand in front of their peers to request assistance. Students would often wait till the end of the class to ask their question, which would leave the instructor staying beyond the scheduled end time answering questions that could have been easily and better answered when the topic was being discussed. Examination periods were no better—students would often hesitate in asking for help for fear of disrupting the rest of the class.
“Having computers integrated into the curriculum is a critical part of equipping our youth with job-ready skills,” says Georgia Voils. “But for years instructors have been ill equipped to monitor and assist students collectively in a classroom setting, making it difficult to keep students on task and engaged.”
The staff at Lewis and Clark Community College recognized that they needed a solution that could help them gain control over their classroom computers and student attention—which is what kickstarted the Faronics Insight evaluation process.
Insight Delivers Total Classroom Control To Teachers
 After the IT personnel and instructors at Lewis and Clark Community College evaluated Insight, they knew it was the solution they needed. The decision was made to deploy Insight in every computer lab—approximately 2,000 computers across campus.
Faronics Insight enabled the instructors of Lewis and Clark Community College to harness the educational and productive aspects of their computers while minimizing classroom distractions. Teachers now had the ability to share their screen with students, provide remote assistance to students from a central console, and monitor classroom screens to ensure students are on task. Students also appreciated the benefits of Insight—they could request and receive help directly in their workstation session, and have their voice heard confidentially through computer-based classroom voting. Whenever instructors needed to capture student attention quickly, they could do so by disabling application and Internet access, or by blanking student screens.
"Once I was introduced to the Insight Teacher Console, it didn’t take me long to learn how to use it in a variety of ways."
“Now that we have Insight, we [the instructors] are able to stop students from surfing the Internet and disrupting classroom instruction,” says Georgia. “I also like the feature where students can quietly notify the instructor that they have a question without fear of disrupting the class.”
“Once I was introduced to the Insight Teacher Console, it didn’t take me long to learn how to use it in a variety of ways,” says Georgia. “For example, even when supervising students during examinations, I still have to answer the phone and check other students into the lab. This used to be a very difficult task; but now with Insight it’s a breeze!”
Georgia continues, “Now I can deny computer access in one area of the lab where I seat students taking paper-and-pencil exams. In another area, I can lock students into the website or application they have permission to access. I can also ‘force’ students to sit as far away from each other as I want by shutting down workstations on either side of students who are already working. All of this without distracting students by walking around and behind them!” "I’m glad that our instructors find Insight extremely easy and intuitive to use"
When asked what the students think of Insight, the common response from the instructors (while chuckling) is that the students are clearly annoyed that they are unable to stray away from the classroom instruction or content. They are quick to point out, however, that the classroom chat and voting features of Insight are very popular. Students appreciate the discretion that the instructor chat feature offers. They can discuss course material and ask questions without leaving their workstations and without disturbing other students. The anonymity that the voting feature provides students allows instructors to receive a more accurate answer to questions posed to the class.
Lewis and Clark’s IT Department has also enjoyed a positive experience with Insight. Denise Erwin, Computer Support Specialist, says “I’m glad that our instructors find Insight extremely easy and intuitive to use—that’s important from an IT perspective because the last thing we want to do is deploy a complicated software package that increases helpdesk requests.”
Insight’s print limiting feature is also great for limiting the amount of paper waste that is generated. By only enabling printer access when students need it for project work, Lewis and Clark Community College is able to reduce their paper consumption—great for saving costs and the environment.
Lewis and Clark’s instructors have found several creative ways to use Insight. For example, Georgia Voils recalls a time when Insight was used to enhance the professional development of the instructors. “Our campus users of WebCT receive monthly instruction using a classroom projector system. A couple of months ago, the projector failed during a WebCT session. I spent some time trying to get the projector running when it struck me that everyone was sitting at a computer in a lab dedicated to online education. So we fired up Insight at the instructor’s station and sent the screen to all the participant’s workstations, while excluding a student worker’s computer so that she could continue with her work.” "Now that we have Insight, we are able to stop students from surfing the Internet and disrupting classroom instruction."
Georgia also remembers another instance where Insight helped her during the HESI nursing entrance exams. “I was sitting at the teacher’s station in an eighty computer theater classroom trying to determine from the students’ body language who was finished with each section of the test and who was not. It occurred to me that Insight might help me, so I opened the thumbnails view of the student screens and found that I could see individual screens in enough detail to tell whether students were still answering questions, or had completed a section of the test and were sitting at the main screen, waiting to move on. I was able to save a total of forty minutes out of a four hour testing session for the entire group, because I could safely announce that it looked like everyone was finished with, for example, the vocabulary test, and could move on to the math section. The students were all interested to learn how I could possibly know that for sure.”
“First Deep Freeze, and now Insight,” says Mary Lou. “I can’t wait to see what Faronics will come out with next.”
Faronics delivers software that helps manage, simplify, and secure multi-user IT environments. Our products ensure 100% workstation availability, and have freed IT personnel from tedious technical support and software issues. Fueled by a customer-centric focus, Faronics’ technology innovations benefit educational institutions, healthcare facilities, libraries, government organizations and corporations. |
