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Proposing for a free Moodle audio recorder: Technical options and faculty needs survey results

2013/10/27 Leave a comment
  1. Current popular options for a free Moodle audio recorder: 
    1. Nanogong is a popular, feature-rich and simple recorder that go entangled in the recent java politics and security scares. Since the company has a non-free offering, chances are higher it will get updated to address these security warnings. It seems the long-term outlook for java in the enterprise is excellent, but i  cannot judge the long term outlook for java as a client/in-browse solution.
    2. Poodle which played the 2nd fiddle to Nanogong for most of the time, seems to have caught up to Nanogong based on the above. that it is "server based" – but on theirs, not ours – Poodle has a freemium business model (could be an issue). Does this include the audio compression load? Does this have FERPA implications (and can they be resolved like with Kaltura)?
    3. Paul Nicholls has a number of flash-based popular audio recorder plugins , where record assignment submission seems to have superseded record assignment type for newer versions of Moodle, and assignment type offers student recording, while  Record Audio repository complements this with teacher recording (and the same interface; i am not sure i understand which end user setup is required for repository).
  2. In the results of faculty survey on learning needs (sum of 0-centered Likert-scale), I find notable
    1. that teacher recording is considered almost as vital as student recording, and
    2. that most faculty even would be willing to deal with some complexity for the additional learning features that some of these recorders offer (Nanogong especially).

Question_text

Rank

It is important that my students can record their speech in my Moodle course (without need for separate software and file upload).

14

It is important that the setup work that the teacher has to do before being able to assign  audio recorder is minimal.

13

It is that the teacher can record her voice in Moodle (without need for separate software and file upload), providing oral instead of written cues or feedback.

11

Simplicity is more important to me than feature richness (controlling volume, limiting the amount of time a student can record, maximum number of recordings, Recordings can be slowed down  or sped up ,  Peer review of recordings).

7

I expect my students to have a microphone connected to or built-in to their home computer.

5

It is important that other media than audio can be "recorded"  (video (outside of Kaltura), webcam snapshots, whiteboard drawings).

5

 

Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, Listening, lms, multimedia-recording, Speaking Tags: , , ,

How-to for the new Vixia HF M500 camera

2013/10/26 Leave a comment

Here it is, and available for checkout per instructions here. Also see the video size considerations.vixia-hfm-500

Step-by-step for Basic Recording:

image

 

image

The Parts and Controls of the Camera:

imageimageimage

Categories: audience-is-students, e-infrastructure, Film-studies, hardware, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, step-by-step-guides Tags: , ,

Best way I found to merge WordPress.com tags

2013/10/22 Leave a comment

image

I am talking about merging spurious variant tags into one canonical form. This is a workaround for the fact that you cannot just update when the update could require wordpress.com to merge the article set form the old tag into an existing article set under the new tag. The work around involves accessing  the spurious tags from the admin / tags interface (window on the right); then opening the "posts" for each spurious tag in a new window. In the posts window to the left, do the "quick edit". I tried saving myself some deleting in the left window by, after opening the left window, deleting the tag in the right window; but the old tag has already been preloaded for the Quick edit into the left window . Well, Quick edit makes it pretty painless. Is a global search/replace for wordpress.com conceivable? Warning: Don’t hit "Edit" after deleting  the tag and try to go back – you will have to hunt for your posts manually.

Categories: e-infrastructure, service-is-documenting, websites Tags: , ,

How to work around “You do not have the permission to view discussions in this forum” in Moodle 2

2013/10/22 Leave a comment
  1. Problem: My student staff (not sure which subset, but more than 1) gets this error in a development course that I use as a groupware when they access a news forum (that they are even force-subscribed to).
    1. image_thumb[12]
    2. CAM03124_thumb[4]
    3. The answers  for “you do not have the permission to view discussions in this forum moodle” can be found here: I actually had to deal with this issue within the last few months.  I found that to allow users to see the “News” section on the front page, you must override the role to allow: mod/forum:viewdiscussion
    4. Do not seem to apply here: In https://moodle2.uncc.edu/admin/roles/permissions.php?contextid=466096, Permitted students are already allowed to  “View discussionsmod/forum:viewdiscussion”
    5. Permitted students should probably have permissions also to “Reply to newsmod/forum:replynews”
    6. image_thumb[10]
    8. Also for one of the student in question (I have spotchecked only 2), I can see no suspicious activity missing: image_thumb[7]
  2. Root cause: 
  3. Students have no role in a Moodle2 Development type course .
  4. Workarounds:
    1. Assign students a role manually (tedious, and you can only assign “course manager”.
    2. Change the course type to Project (but then you cannot quiz students).
  5. Solution: a more flexible design of Project and Development courses in a future version of Moodle?
Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, lms Tags: , ,

How to upload a folder with many files in Moodle 2–the ultimate training

2013/10/22 Leave a comment
  1. …using animated .gifs. Different speed? 0.25sec,0.5sec, 0.75sec, 1sec, , 2sec, 3sec, 4sec, 5sec, 6sec, 7sec, 8sec, 9sec, 10sec. 1.5sec
  2. And the answer is: You now can simply drag-and-drop a zip file  (provided you are using a recent web browser). Start with “Turn editing on”, “Add resource”, “Folder”, and then proceed like so:
  3. Easy enough, but you can still save time: If your folder is reusable not only between terms, but also teachers (sections etc.), I suggest doing this in our Moodle metacourses (once).
  4. If you want to use an existing instead of adding a new folder, a slightly different way to manage your multiple files upload in Moodle 2 is described here.
Categories: animated-GIFs, audience-is-teachers, e-learning, lms, training Tags: , ,

How teachers can include a link to their metacourse content in their Moodle course

2013/10/21 Leave a comment
  1. How teachers get the metacourse link:
    1. image
    2. Find your metacourse and expand (1).
    3. find your resource (the textbook is actually “Voilà”, but we want to make extra sure there are no non-ASCII compatibility issues) and right-click (2).
    4. Click “copy link location” (3).
  2. How to use the metacourse link in your actual course:
    1. image
    2. You can e.g. start a new topic (0).
    3. Add title (1).
    4. Add text (2).
    5. Add link to text (3).
    6. Paste link from clipboard. (4)
    7. I you choose open in new window (5), following the link will not navigate the student away from your actual course in the main web browser window.
  3. Result: image Caveats:
    1. FireFox opens in a new tab, even if you in Moodle request to open in a new window.
    2. You can only link to the root folder of a Moodle Metacourse. If there are multiple content sets within your textbook folder, please advise your student of the name.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, documentation, learning-materials, lms, textbooks Tags: , ,

Audacity on startup automatically selects the "microphone" as recording device…

2013/10/18 Leave a comment
  1. Which is a problem if we do not use the front microphone jack, but rather the rear input: CAM03119
  2. Seems to be still an issue on the Group computers….
  3. Solution is the same as found and documented for the listening stations in relation to problems students had with how Saba Centra handles audio hardware, disable  the front jack in mmsys.cpl of Windows7:  CAM03120
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, Glitches&Errors, multimedia-recording, small-group-work-spaces Tags: , ,

How a teacher can easily grade a NanoGong audio recording assignment in Moodle

2013/10/17 Leave a comment
  1. Similar to grading video recording assignments with Moodle Kaltura, You can enter in 2 ways:
    1. By clicking on the assignment like your students: CAM03104
    2. Or by clicking on Activities: NanoGong Voices CAM03116
  2. Before you make it to the assignment page and can see the NanoGong plugin, you may have to bypass some Java warning dialogues.
  3. On the assignment page:
    1. Click (1) speaker symbol for the recorder control to show up.CAM03113
    2. You can also
      1. enter (1) feedback
      2. or (2) re-sort the submissions – we had to click this once for the recordings to actually shows up (seems to refresh the page).CAM03110
      3. I have not had the chance to see the results in the Gradebook, but here are some screenshots from blogs of users that have:
        1. ng2.jpg
      4. ng6.gif
Categories: assignments, audience-is-teachers, grading, lms, multimedia-recording, recording-software Tags: , , ,