The Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine is committed to collaboration as they train future primary care physicians and specialists, transforming the next generation of health care leaders.
Over the past five years, the Heritage College expanded from just a single campus in Athens, Ohio to three locations - now including medical education facilities in Cleveland, Ohio and Dublin, Ohio. With the addition of video conferencing into their curriculum, enrollment numbers doubled, while faculty and staff increased by approximately 15%.
When building its new, state-of-the-art facility for their Athens campus, Heritage College sought technology solutions that would improve communication for faculty and student teams across all three campuses.
When deciding what technology to install, faculty at each campus were presented with possible solutions, and invited to share feedback.
Here is the faculty wish list they created for technology solutions - to virtually connect the three campuses for in-person as well as distance teaching and learning:
- Touchscreen capabilities, so instructors can interact with content
- Ability to teach by moving throughout the physical space - not being fixed to a specific lectern
- Instructor control of video feeds so they can easily matrix switch from campus to campus
- Increased engagement with students at ‘far end’ campuses
- Enhanced teamwork interaction between students across campuses
T1V’s ThinkHub Connect MultiSite was chosen as the collaborative tool to power eight Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs) across campus locations.
ThinkHub Connect technology was designed to enhance the learning environment for instructors and students alike. The ThinkHub Connect solution is a powerful combination of ThinkHub, ViewHub, and the T1V App AirConnect technology - all working in tandem to provide instructors a powerful presentation tool, while enabling them to monitor and provide feedback on student work in real-time.
AirConnect allows students to wirelessly connect and collaborate to a massive interactive ThinkHub Canvas. They can connect face-to-face with any of the integrated video conferencing applications: BlueJeans, MS Teams, Skype for Business, Webex or Zoom - all while instructors broadcast and annotate on student group content.
Supporting all types of classroom scenarios - from completely in-room, to hybrid classrooms - just an instructor in the classroom and all students remote, or everyone remote - ThinkHub Connect is both flexible and highly customizable.
At any of the Heritage College locations, instructors have the customized ability to control students stations at all three campuses from one Instructor Station, without any additional hardware needed.
ThinkHub MultiSite is an add-on module to ThinkHub Connect and supports up to 10 locations in a single MultiSite session for real-time room-to-room collaboration. Here, the shared Canvas is directly connected between multiple locations is easily accessible and updated immediately.
With the Heritage College’s new curriculum centered around active learning and team based learning, Jodie Penrod, Senior Director of Technology at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine explained, “We were excited to find solutions for our active learning classrooms that would really engage our curriculum and ultimately make it better for our students as we connect between our three campuses.”
She continued,
“The ThinkHub Connect MultiSite functionality was a perfect fit for meeting our requirements in our Active Learning Classroom design because of the shared video conference and the shared content between our three campuses during a learning activity.”
Learn more about how ThinkHub Connect MultiSite connects multiple teaching and learning locations and creates a shared educational experience between faculty and students - regardless of their location.
