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Learning materials management: Online_resources.xls II: E-repository (2006-7)

2009/02/17 Leave a comment

I participated in the implementation of a “ learning object” repository – is there such a thing as a learning “object”  in a progression-oriented field like SLA? Anyhow, the software of choice was Equella which, as I read on the listservs, is favored by Blackboard Admins for its Blackboard module and is supposed to provide the primary interface to the equella for instructors in their Blackboard course websites.

Since this did not get implemented during my time, we used what seems primarily the admin-interface and, since equella does not come with one, attempted to implement a metadata schema, based on the prior work of an LLAS-sponsored group. We also soon found that despite complexity, the metadata schema was still lacking (E.g. you won’t get through French 101 without several sections on “Negation”. nor German, nor Spanish etc.).

Excel to the rescue once more: Here is a spreadsheet in action that not only allows adding, tagging, searching and filtering links to, once more – easier than to make your own – web-based exercises, but now also allows the collaborative building of a metadata schema. But alas, the number of fields is growing again.

Categories: e-learning, erepository, Institution-is-Aston-University, learning-materials, service-is-library, Spreadsheets Tags: , ,

Learning materials management: Online_resources.xls I: Intranet (2003-2009)

2009/02/17 Leave a comment

Language labs tend to have many multimedia files (audio and video) on network shares – still more flexible than the web-based interfaces we are given (1 user operation does a batch on many files versus multiple clicks are needed for an operation on 1 file).

As a variation on the spreadsheet for multimedia file collections, I created a cataloging spreadsheet that imports lists of audio and video files, including metadata which gets preserved when windows media center records commercial digital TV, from a language center network share – you can find sample code on MS-Excel lists. You can see the import code in action in this screen cast.

Unfortunately, no recursion into subfolders and once more meant to move the files off the network and store on DVDs, for lack of space. Here at least the  fields are less and the search relies more on regular expressions.

The current quick and dirty incarnation of self-made source material for interpreting exercises is here:

Categories: e-learning, learning-materials, Media, service-is-library, Spreadsheets Tags: ,

Learning materials management: Textbook exercises (2000-2008)

2009/02/17 Leave a comment

Textbook exercise management is a rapidly evolving field, with more textbook becoming digital and online resources and more metadata getting added and AI getting implemented to enable personalized (data-driven, feedback-based) learning paths.

German.xls was an attempt to be able to sort, search, filter the exercises of some bigger textbooks in the American college market, each containing thousands of exercises (how many? why does it take a sumif() to find out?):

Subtitles.xls converted text files with movie subtitles which can be extracted from DVDs or found into spreadsheet for post-processing (search, filter, sort – and assign different show times, for DVD editions differ). online,
Auralog Tell me more 7 is a language program that allegedly comes with “more than five times the amount of content than other language programs” – but strangely not with a table of contents of its exercises. Automation extracted the exercises first into the file system for full text search with Windows Desktop Search, then converted the extracted files into links in the Auralog Content XLS.

Categories: e-languages, Institution-is-Aston-University, Institution-is-University-of-Tampa, learning-materials, service-is-library, Spreadsheets Tags: , , , ,