Category: Evidence

Canvas Roster Export for CATME

I just became aware that I’ll need to update our PSU CATME Site.

There are a few videos that need to be either removed or replaced.

I’m more concerned about the next task which is updating our information to assist users with exporting Group membership information from Canvas. I could have sworn that the Canvas Export Grades feature included Group information, but I may be wrong since there is a Canvas Community post that addresses this.

At the bottom of the comments is a post by Lucy Bamwo with a creative workaround:

Currently, there is no way of exporting groups out of Canvas. However, you could set up a group assignment (assign marks to whole group) 0 point, non-submission assignment, place in 0% weighting group and make sure that it has no due date and the grade posting policy is set to manual. You can then score the group with a number in speedgrader and then export the csv from the gradebook. You will then be able to sort them into groups by the group score given.

I didn’t see that information until after I requested Brian Daigle from our Production Team to create a script that would pull the Group information using the Canvas API. I found this information and attempted to apply it to our needs, but didn’t have success. I reached out to Brian because I know he has experience using the Canvas API. In a couple of hours, he had a working Python script that I helped to fine tune to match the input parameters that CATME looks for. While this approach is the most effective solution we have so far, it does require the user to be able to use Python and have the related Canvas module installed.

Recording Lectures using Zoom

When teaching online, blended, flipped classes, or preparing for class cancelations, recording your lectures can be an extremely useful technique.

I recommend using Zoom since Penn State has a license for all faculty, staff, and students. If you have any technical questions, you can contact the Helpdesk for assistance.

Here is a list of steps and related best practices:

  1. Quiet space
    1. Do not disturb signs
    2. Let others know that you’ll be recording
    3. Turn off notifications and silence your devices
  2. Prepare
    1. Plug in and test your headset or microphone
    2. Download the Zoom desktop client
    3. Adjust your Preferences
      1. Cloud Recording preferences overview
      2. Adjust recording preferences
        1. Check “Optimize the recording for 3rd party video editor” option
        2. Check “Audio transcript” option
    4. Record
      1. Consider chunking your presentations down into natural sub-topics
      2. Switch to Presentation-mode if you are sharing your slides
      3. For first recordings or when recording in a new space, record only a minute or so and check that recording to make sure everything looks good before recording your entire video
    5. Share
      1. Zoom will send you email notification(s) when your cloud recording is done processing
      2. Access your recordings
      3. Copy the Share link and distribute it to your students

Please contact the Office of Learning Design or check out the online web resources with questions.

Media for INTAF 897: Deception and Counter-Deception

The following are some materials gathered for Col. Jacob Graham’s (ret. USMC) INTAF 897 course. These 3 particular subjects were mentioned in Malcom Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know.”

Go to this Sway

Accessibility

None of the images or videos have been QA’d for accessibility at this time. Updates will be posted here. Given that this Sway is only a draft, accommodations like transcripts will be developed on an “as needed” basis.

Sway

Sway has some nice media features and makes adding images and video relatively easy, although there are some limitations.

  • To add media, click on the “+” > “Media” tab > choose the form of media.
  • It doesn’t seem possible to preview the media within Sway, so I previewed videos in YouTube.
  • For the videos I wanted to use, I copied-pasted the URL in Sway’s Media Search field to display the exact video I was looking for.
  • Sway doesn’t natively display the titles of the YouTube videos, so I copied-pasted them in as captions so that the audience has some sense of what they can view.

I also discovered by accident that you can group Sway elements by clicking-dragging the elements over one another. There are grouping options available as well. This might be a good strategy to keep related content closely associated for pedagogical reasons.

Kaltura

  1. Created a Channel in Kaltura
  2. Created a Playlist in Kaltura
  3. “Add New” > “YouTube Video”
  4. Copied-pasted link to video
  5. Returned to new Kaltura Channel > clicked on checkbox next to video > “Publish”

This process takes too long. I don’t want to have to do multiple steps for every video.

In-line CSS and Left and Right-alignment on a single line of text

In a few lesson pages in SRA 111, we have two different topics on the same page. The content appears sequentially on the page. I needed a solution to let visitors know that below the first chunk of content, there was indeed a second chunk of content.

I found information on two websites that have helped me with a possible solution:

With this information, I was able to code the following…

<h2 style=”text-align: left;”>[Title of Content Chunk 1] <span style=”float: right;”><a href=”#chunk2″>[Title of Content Chunk 2]</a></span></h2>

…

<hr />
<h2><a id=”chunk2″></a>[Title of Content Chunk 2]</h2>

The top of the page looks like this…

screen-shot-2016-12-12-at-10-29-22-pm

And the link takes the user down to where the <id> tag is…

screenshot of second chunk of content

While not an entirely standard way of formatting text in our lessons, I’m going to try this out and see how it works for now. It’s better than not doing anything!

Progress on the Decision Tool for the Instructional Use of Video website

I have been serving on a sub-committee to develop an online tool that will hopefully help faculty when they’ve made a decision to use video in their courses.

April Millet is the chair, and we’re joined by Ryan Wetzel, Victoria Raish, John Buckwalter, and Peter Warren.

In our last few meetings, we’ve been hammering away at the Formidable Forms plug-in for WordPress. We’re trying to squeeze our required functionality out of the tool and we think we have a solution. I have to give a huge shout out to Ryan who was behind the keyboard and lead a lot of the detailed tinkering of the code.

I spent this morning deconstructing the code again and worked to establish a process. I was successful and even worked on some formatting things that were bugging me. I took everything I learned and blasted out a working draft of the tool on our website.

I’ve documented my work thus far in five screencasts that have been posted to my YouTube channel. I still have more work to capture there, but it’s a good start.

We still have a lot of work to do, but we’ve proven that it can be done and all we need to do is fine-tune our content and delivery and we should be very close to delivery.

Gravity Forms at sites.psu.edu going “bye bye”?

I’ve been working with Ryan Wetzel on building a tool for faculty that will hopefully help them to understand options for using video content for instructional purposes.

We began this project almost a year ago, before CampusPress took over the duty of hosting our Penn State WordPress sites. The transition has been rocky for me as I’ve blogged about in earlier entries.

The newest hiccup is that there are apparently issues with Gravity Forms on this new platform. I’ll share Ryan’s assessment of what he has seen…

For us, Gravity Forms is still working more or less as it is supposed to, however we are getting locked out of forms with no way to unlock them to edit content. Campuspress recommends we clone the form and delete the original whenever this happens then replace the form ID with the new form ID on the page where the form is located. This works for awhile until the form locks us out again.

My staff has been working on duplicating our existing forms in Formidable. It mostly does the same stuff however it formats dates and time in strange ways and allows the user to submit incorrect data (rather than supply a calendar or limiting selections to real HH:MM selections).

It’s hard to say about the conditional logical until we actually spend time building something out with it. However I do believe that Campuspress plans on doing away with Gravity Forms at some point, not sure when, and that Formidable is their forms platform going forward.

I began porting our content over from Gravity Forms into Formidable Forms this morning. Thankfully the process has gone well so far. At worst, this will be additional work because we have to copy and paste all of the content from one form into another. There is not automatic export-import function from what I can tell.

We’ll keep pushing ahead for the time being and hope that all goes well. Do you have any experiences with either Gravity Forms or Formidable? Has your transition to CampusPress gone well?

Using VoiceThread

Dr. Chu stopped by my office with a question about opensource options for recording lectures that he may want to share with his students while he is traveling.

I sat down with him at my computer and walked through how to use VoiceThread. I had the foresight to record the session (22 min 06 sec) in case he would like to refer to it for future use.

I cover the following topics:

  • creating / uploading content
  • commenting / recording
  • sharing
  • editing existing VoiceThreads
  • uploading video content
  • commenting on video content

There are some excellent guides online with more information at https://voicethread.com/howto/category/web-application/.

I would also like to mention best practices when preparing to record. I have created an Evernote with a section on recording best practices.

Google Sheets and =ARRAYFORMULA ( )

My supervisor and director of our office, Amy Garbrick, likes spreadsheets. Who doesn’t, when they are well formatted? They are a great way of processing lots of data quickly.

I use a number of project management tools and Google Sheets is one of them. I have one particular sheet that is very extensive that I’ve been using for some years now to track all of the tasks I need to do in order to prepare new sections for upcoming semesters. The devil is in the details and I’ve been burnt by the devil many times in the past.

While the sheet does a good job for me, I’ve been looking for a way to quickly and easily distill parts of my spreadsheet for others. There’s too much data for quick reviews that Amy and others need. I found a discussion post that led me to a great solution. This information wasn’t enough, but I found a YouTube video that helped me to piece it all together.

It involves using the =ARRAYFORMULA( ) formula to pull data from cells in a different worksheet and allows me to format that data in such a way that others can make sense of it.

New addition to our online simulation tool: ADG#2 Diabolical Deeds in the District

I met with Col. Jacob Graham (ret.) earlier this week to show him the new online platform that I’ve created to deliver various online simulations that our faculty have authored and use in their resident and online courses. These simulations are team-based efforts that establish a narrative where students have to role-play various entities with the goal of uncovering a plot using intelligence analysis skills and techniques. Probably not accurate, but I would describe it as an elaborate game of Clue.

The platform I have developed uses Canvas and WordPress to deliver various forms of intelligence to teams on a scheduled and ad-hoc basis. In the past, it has taken us weeks to design and develop a simulation even with existing electronic content. A few days ago, I was able to spin up a completely working Analytic Decision Game (ADG) for Jake in a little more than 90 minutes. Granted, Jake still needs to review the intelligence to make sure the content is up-to-date and formatted correctly, but the ADG could run now if needed.

I have updated instructions and added a draft overview, but need to spend a lot more time building out those development resources in the event of a “lottery” moment – my term for succession planning.

Office of Learning Design Nominated for IST Team Award

The award honors staff members in the College of IST whom, through exemplary team effort, have successfully completed a project of major impact within the college.

We just received a wonderful note congratulating us on being nominated for the IST Team Award. Again, it’s awesome to know that others value the hard work our team has put out this past year to help prepare the College for the transition to Canvas.

From: Andrew Sears
Subject: Congratuations
Date: May 3, 2016 at 8:43:34 PM EDT

I wanted to congratulate the group on being nominated for the Team Award. While only one team can receive the award, just being nominated is an honor in itself.

I look forward to seeing and hearing more about your achievements in the future. Keep up the good work.

Once again, congratulations.

Andrew

—
Andrew Sears
Dean and Professor
College of Information Sciences and Technology
and
Interim Chief Information Security Officer
The Pennsylvania State University
332 Information Sciences and Technology Building
University Park, PA 16802