Thomas' Work Space

Quia Options for Grading in course or book or exercise

2011/08/31 plagwitz Leave a comment

The instructor workstation features prominently the tab : options.
if you go into grading, you see that not all options can be changed from here.
However, when customizing your book, you may have already found the options next to each individual exercise that allow you to change Spelling/Case sensitivity
However, if you go to the tab: book, you will find more options there, including how you can change Feedback and Spelling/Case sensitivity for the entire book instead of individual exercises:

Categories: e-languages, learning-materials, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, textbooks Tags: centro, quia

Centro/Quia student access problems at term start: What OneKey?

2011/08/31 plagwitz Leave a comment

Our Pearson/Prentice Hall textbook comes with online component, access to which is purchased in the University bookstore.
The textbook comes with a setup brochure (OneKey, yellow) that states: “Go to www.prenhall.com/onekey, click OneKey for Students, then click Getting Started, and select CourseCompass. Follow the on-screen instructions to register for CourseCompass”.
This page is unresponsive und forwards to http://www.pearsonhighered.com/
Cute but I have no idea how to continue from here.
if you try to enter the “CourseCompass Access Code” by browsing manually to www.coursecompass.com, you will read: “CourseCompass is now MyLab and Mastering If you had a CourseCompass account, it works with MyLab / Mastering. Sign in now.” Maybe this change broke the entire signup process?
100000s of these packages must have been sold by now, each costing 100s of dollars. Why do students and teachers have to waste entire class hours, each worth also 100s of dollars, on banging their head against this pay wall even after they paid?
When reading the instructions, I found it necessary to highlight the steps our students need to take:
1. CourseCompass Access Code
2. CourseCompass Course ID
3. Account username and password
4. Quia Student Book Key
5. Quia Course Code
Wow! With my teacher login, I can see that the online content which is protected by this pay wall is still the same literally translated print lab manual/workbook material. Must be decades old now.

Categories: learning-materials, textbooks Tags: centro, CourseCompass, mylab, onekey, pearson, quia

How to more easily (student permissions, term recycle) distribute learning materials using Moodle metacourses

2011/08/31 plagwitz Leave a comment

Problem: Audio CDs are an outdated medium, file shares and web drive interfaces to them are unfamiliar to both students and teachers and difficult to browse. Moodle, the familiar learning environment, by default, requires teachers to manage textbook audio and other learning materials within each Moodle course = section times term. This leads to a lot of duplication, both in effort and storage.

Solution: Moodle Metacourses can serve, maybe not as a solution (only a poor man’s eRepository), but as a workaround. Read here, how:

Moodle metacourses, part I: The Pedagogy: Do you want the LRC to distribute files for
your courses through Moodle?

Moodle metacourses, part II: The technology

Moodle Metacourses, part III: The support workflow: File-renaming

Moodle Metacourses, part IV: The support workflow: Transcoding audio learning materials

Moodle metacourses, part V: The support workflow: Uploading

LRC learning resources Moodle metacourses: Our list

LRC online language learning materials: the list

Categories: learning-materials, lms, service-is-library Tags: metacourses, moodle

Moodle Metacourses, part III: The support workflow: File-renaming

2011/08/31 plagwitz 2 comments

We discussed file renaming utilities in an earlier post. Here are some more practical tips:

Limitations: While both utilities can accept Windows Search Result sets, drag-drop seems limited to fewer than 256 files at a time (on my Vista 64-bit – but that is not an OS limitation, since MS Expression Encoder can accept a drag-and-drop of all over 3.5k files that need reencoding).

Workaround: both utilities have a folder-select, and Renamer in addition accepts file masks, which can mimic some basic searches:

Bulk Rename Issue: While it allows for “Select from Clipboard” which you can use with the Windows “Copy as Path”/”Send to Clipboard as Name” feature which works with search result sets. However, I could not get this feature to work (neither with the default “” around the path nor, after removing them manually, without).

Renamer, Issue: rule, clean up, strip-out-content-of-brackets-does-not-what-it-should:

Renamer-translit-anglicize-foreign-language-diacritics: unfortunately still recommended for technical reasons; Renamer has presets, e.g. German here: TBA

Only one preset can be inserted add a time (overwrites previous) – but you can build your list with copy/paste from/to this text box and persist it to disk to load it later, just like the search rules – an extremely handy feature.

Categories: e-languages, e-learning, erepository, learning-materials Tags: file-renaming, metacourses, software, utilities

Moodle Metacourses, part IV: The support workflow: Transcoding audio learning materials

2011/08/31 plagwitz 1 comment

The MS-WMA-Voice codec features very acceptable audio quality for spoken language learning materials in a highly compressed format. It allowed me to reduce our existing audio files collection size by about 50%.

Expression Encoder 3 crashed a few times during encoding this queue of 3.500 audio files. In addition, it took a long time to reload the .XEJ project files of such a size. It is, however, easy enough to inspect the XEJ in an XML editor:

And even easier to delete the finished media files form the queue using a text editor:

I am wondering whether this queuing could be streamlined (recovery automated, and the need for human interaction be reduced) using the PowerShell Module for Automating Expression-Encoder, but so far the process is good enough.

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, e-infrastructure, learning-materials Tags: audio, codecs, metacourses, ms-expression-encoder, windows-media-audio

Sanako Study-1200 slow spanning 2 screens with different resolutions

2011/08/31 plagwitz 1 comment

UPDATE2: 2013-09: apparently new video driver crashes with autoscan window, this time even on primary screen alone?
UPDATE: 2011-01:Problem seems to have disappeared (windows update?)
Symptom: This is on a Dell Optiplex 760 (B6CCLK1) which has no problems with Sanako’s screen sharing application, as long as you do not attempt to span the windows across two screens with different resolution which makes even the mouse jerky. Not sure, but do not remember having this problem across two screens with the same resolution. Actually, the Sanako subwindow (remote ctronl specifically) slows down the computer even if it is only on th secondary screen.
Solution: Relatively easily fixed, if you can afford upgrading not only the screen, but also the LCD projector that hangs on one of the screens…
Workaround: Do not span sub-windows of Sanako Study-1200 across screens. This problem can become so bad that the Sanako sub window becomes completely unresponsive and cannot be moved or closed (neither with the close button in the upper right nor with ALT-F4). Try CTRL-ALT-ESC then and kill the process. You could also try and upgrade the video card driver which may be the true culprit. However, on the Sanako sub windows seem to display the problem (screensharing with remote control, chat also). E.g. Internet Explorer windows do not have the same problem when spanned across screens.

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Glitches&Errors Tags: dual-screen, FAQs, sanako-study-1200

Room and Equipment handling using MS-Exchange Resource Mailboxes: To train in Outlook Desktop or in OWA ?

2011/08/30 plagwitz 2 comments

While Outlook desktop is a more powerful calendaring tool than OWA (cf. viewing calendars in overlay mode), we decided to first focus on getting everybody to be functional with meeting requests in OWA, since

faculty will want to use this system from their home computers where the outlook desktop configuration, if it exists at all , is probably even more lacking. Students could, but are not likely to have outlook desktop either
both faculty and students (both for rooms and for equipment) will walk up to the LRC reception desk needing help, and then only OWA is available
it is actually part of both equipment check-out and check-in procedure (if not for rooms, then for equipment) that I am designing that faculty and students open up from OWA (on the web browser that the lab assistant is not using: internet explorer, Firefox, Safari should gives us always 2 options on either operating system) that the meeting that they have made (or if not made, make one on the fly), and that the lab assistant enters a code (generated on the PC at the reception desk) into their appointment and sends the update for them to see them through;
we can also serve as backup on our office computers for the reception desk (unstaffed or understaffed), if clients use OWA

Essentially, it is not a PC Environment anymore (although it could be if our Remote Desktop infrastructure were much stronger).

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, training Tags: calendaring, ms-exchange, ms-outlook, resource-mailboxes, resource-scheduling

LRC Outlook/Exchange 2010 Calendaring: What happens after the meeting request? Automated or manual responses and reminders

2011/08/30 plagwitz 3 comments

If you have been invited to a meeting, e.g. a co-taught class in the LRC, you will see in your inbox an email-like meeting request with pre-set answer options:

Wait, there is more: Proposing:
If you followed the instructions in TBA:request meeting, you should immediately get an acceptance response from the resource:
If something went wrong, read the denial response for how to overcome the issue:

there are resource specific policies, like maximum booking duration, listed here: TBA: list resources
if there is a conflict with a prior booking of the resources, please go back to the meeting request scheduling assistant and find a time when the resource is available.
if you requested a recurring/repeating meeting, like for a weekly class meeting in the LRC, there may be individual conflicts. Note that we have set the resource scheduling options for the non-conflicting instances of your request to be accepted (in most cases). For how to deal with the conflicting instances, study the conflict information in the denial response.

Note that the LRC calendars are set up so that the LRC staff is copied (as delegates) on LRC resource requests (as a backup for issues and paper trail for reporting):
If you find you get too many meeting reminders that you do not need, when requesting a meeting, turn the default reminder option off: