Higher Education
Harper College, located in Palatine, Illinois, serves around 26,500 students in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Renowned for its innovative teaching and learning approaches, Harper College has effectively leveraged GoReact, a powerful skills mastery and assessment solution, to enhance student engagement and success across multiple departments.
Initially adopted to help communication students record, review, and receive feedback on their speeches, GoReact quickly proved its value. But like many institutions, the pandemic forced other departments to investigate technology to deliver instruction. The success and positive impact on the communication students’ learning experiences spread across campus, leading to widespread adoption by other departments.
GoReact first arrived on Harper’s College in 2015 via Jeff Przybylo, who chairs the college’s communication department and coaches their national championship speech and debate team. The capabilities of GoReact for students to record themselves presenting, and then receive in-the-moment feedback from peers and faculty was a perfect fit. It didn’t take long for other faculty to hear about the success with GoReact.
Soon, departments like Physics, Phlebotomy, Math, Kinesiology and Law, started using GoReact through the sitewide license and finding improvements in student engagement and skill practice and refinement.
When departments are purchasing, implementing and supporting varied tech tools within an institution, it’s often a costly and complicated approach. The pivot that the pandemic forced on Harper, like many other colleges, also provided funding to make technology acquisition possible. Other departments had heard about the success Harper’s communication and ASL departments were having with GoReact, so expanding to a sitewide license just made sense.
“When a tool requires an individual faculty member or a department to figure out how to pay for access, that is often an insurmountable barrier to implementation, as usually faculty are interested in solutions that they can try right away to meet immediate needs of their students.” – Melissa Baysingar, Instructional Designer at Harper College
Institutions like Harper see a cost savings when they opt for a sitewide license, instead of individual departments purchasing their own licenses by lowering the cost per user. Harper saved about $150,000 by expanding to a sitewide license. This type of license also makes the technology accessible to more students, allowing them to add users without incurring additional costs.
Another difference-maker for Harper to take GoReact sitewide was the seamless integration with Blackboard, their Learning Management System (LMS). Having GoReact accessible through the LMS increased adoption and usage immediately, and made it easier to support from a technology perspective. In addition to Blackboard, GoReact integrates with any LTI-compliant LMS.
“When we got the site license and got GoReact integrated in Blackboard, it was like turning on an engine – everyone could now be up and running immediately with GoReact … Once GoReact was available for everyone, we could develop training and promote it knowing that our audience was all faculty at the college, not just those working in departments that had established the funding for the licenses. Now, faculty that reach out looking for solutions where GoReact is a good fit can have a GoReact assignment built that very day.“ – Melissa Baysingar, Instructional Designer at Harper College
The integration of GoReact across Harper College has led to several notable benefits:
For the phlebotomy program at Harper College there has been improvements noted in the student engagement/connection in the course discussions and improvement is completing the assignments on time. In addition, this allows students to share their clinical experiences as well.” – Donna Oswald, Phlebotomy Program Coordinator at Harper College
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