New Online Video Teaching Tool Launches at New York’s Baruch College

(Nov. 14, 2007) Portland, Oregon web-development studio Cast Iron Coding, is proud to announce the pilot launch of a new video-based, online teaching application at Baruch College, the undergraduate business school at the City University of New York.

VOCAT (Video Oral Diagnostic Assessment Tool) is an easy-to-use web application that allows Baruch College instructors to collect, store, and evaluate video recordings of students’ oral presentations—and securely share this data with both faculty and students. Developed by Cast Iron Coding for the Bernard L. Schwartz Institute of Communications, VOCAT was designed to help Baruch College assess and improve the oral presentation skills of its undergraduates—a fundamental component of professional literacy for Baruch’s business students, many of whom speak English as a second language.

“By allowing students to watch their presentations online, alongside their instructor’s comments, VOCAT lets our students see their own strengths and weakness for themselves,” says Mikhail Gershovich, Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch. “This creates a powerful kind of self-awareness that really helps students change, and improve their speaking techniques.”

To develop a flexible, but stable teaching tool—one capable of supporting digital media, interacting with the university’s existing data storage structures, and meeting ever-changing instructional needs—Cast Iron Coding built VOCAT using the sophisticated content management system TYPO3. This innovative use of TYPO3 as application development framework, with its reliable APIs and robust core features, significantly reduced development time, and, according to Cast Iron Coding founder Zach Davis, “provides the ideal combination of scalability, and instructional flexibility that an educational institution needs to employ this kind of powerful instructional tool across the curriculum.”

Cast Iron Coding also provided on-site consulting, meeting with Baruch’s communication institute staff, faculty, professors, the university’s webmaster, and Baruch College’s IT staff to ensure that diverse priorities across the institution were addressed. The result is an exciting, multimedia teaching tool that not only achieves the Institute’s pedagogical vision, but also meets the standards of CUNY’s IT infrastructure (requiring, for example, such advanced features as a custom-built authentication service to seamlessly integrate VOCAT with the college’s central student database on Baruch’s LDAP server and integration with the college’s Oracle registration database).

“With their experience in educational technology, Cast Iron Coding was able to visualize how VOCAT would work in the classroom in a way that other contractors we spoke with clearly could not,” says Gershovich. “We also faced considerable technical constraints on our end but Cast Iron Coding was able to partner with Baruch’s IT staff to ensure that the project was a success.”

Contacts:

Zach Davis, Owner
Cast Iron Coding, LLC
503.841.5669
FAX
866.285.6140
zach(at)castironcoding.com

Mikhail Gershovich, Director,
Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute
Baruch College, City University of New York
646.312.2062
Mikhail_gershovich(at)baruch.cuny.edu