Linas – Kent Matsueda

RHS 301 Student having problems Copying&Pasting from Word into MT4

I’ve been trading emails with a student who’s apparently having problems moving content generated in a desktop word processor, I think it is Word, into his MT4 blog. I just made a test and things look good for me. So I’ve asked for his URL and original document. He worked with the Helpdesk after speaking with Linas and suggested that he use WordPad as an intermediary. That apparently helped, but didn’t solve his problems. I won’t be able to offer any additional assistance unless I see his originals.

Anyone else having problems with copying and pasting docs from the desktop into MT4?

Example from this document (Blooms and Question Types.docx):

E-learning and Assessment

Version 4.

Reference http://wiscinfo.doit.wisc.edu/teaching-academy/Assistance/course/questions.htm

The education strategy (March 2004) has highlighted that Bristol University:-

1. Is a “research intensive” university where the student learning experience is informed by research and is delivered by research active staff.

2. Wishes to retain its high quality teaching.

3. Needs to widen access and to look at diverse progression routes into HE.

4. Needs to expand postgraduate numbers – particularly on taught masters programmes

5. To retain their highly rated international research output and to deliver high quality teaching, requires that teaching is cost effective.

Whilst E-learning has a relevance to all of these points, this paper will focus on point 5 i.e. the requirement for teaching to be cost effective. The contribution of E-learning to assessment is a major area where substantial gains in efficiency can be achieved.

Currently staff spend a significant amount of time

1. setting examinations

2. ensuring that they match course learning objectives,

3. liasing with the external examiner

4. marking

5. exam related student administration

Much of this activity is repeated at least twice per year and sadly the outcome is often only summative rather than formative. Several staff within the university have already adopted CAA (computer aided assessment) as a means of addressing this problem and have found pedagogic as well as efficiency gains. However this approach has not yet become embedded. Reasons for this limited uptake include:-

Back from Paternity Leave

I was out the last week for the birth of my little girl, Kylie. It was a wonderful experience. For the first few days, I’ll only be here half the day. It’ll give me a chance to catch up and…

I was out the last week for the birth of my little girl, Kylie. It was a wonderful experience. For the first few days, I’ll only be here half the day. It’ll give me a chance to catch up and get back into the swing of things. I caught up with Linas a little about the last week and he said there weren’t any major issues.

Emails
Phone Messages
Pressing Issues
Projects

NURS Courses for the Spring
CE Faculty Portal
Google Apps for Education

More ooVoo Testing

Just did connection tests on the wireless out here and everything looks good. We were getting 8.07 Mbps Down and 2.33 Mbps Up on the Guest network and 6.15 Mbps Down and 6.13 Mbps Up on the Penn State network…

Our AV signal paused a few times on the PSU connection when we were moving around. It was probably due to moving from one wireless connection to another. The Guest network dropped once during testing on the first floor in the PSPB side of the building.

We believe it’s the instructor’s computer since he was experiencing problems with Skype as well.

On our own with Protected PASS

Linas and I have been trying to figure out how to access protected content in PASS. We know how to manage content in the www_Protected directory using the PASS Explorer and SMB server access. We know how to manage the…

Linas and I have been trying to figure out how to access protected content in PASS. We know how to manage content in the www_Protected directory using the PASS Explorer and SMB server access. We know how to manage the permissions using the web-based Access Control Manager Wizard. All we needed to know is what URL to use to access protected content.

Unfortunately the Learning Design IT staff either didn’t know how to do it themselves or they didn’t make the time to give us a quick hand. That was frustrating because I knew it was an easy answer that was just out of our reach. So, what is the answer?
The base URL for my protected space is: https://protected.personal.psu.edu/kkm11/
And that information can be found at: http://kb.its.psu.edu/article/1103
I hope that helps someone else in the future.

ABA Virtual Practicum Video Encoding

I came in this morning and spoke with Linas about the ABA Practicum. We found that one student uploaded a 220+ MB file, only a few MB’s lower than the 250 MB limit. We were a little surprised to find out that the video was only 0:01:20 long because it was encoded at over 23 Mbps! Commercial DVD’s are encoded at around 9 Mbps and Bluray comes in at around 40 Mbps. This student was definitely going to have to re-encode their videos.

I ran a Handbrake test and found that encoding the video at 900 kbps yielded a video file that was just over 10 MB and played back at a little over 1 Mbps.

Regular Profile
MP4 file, H.264 codec (x264)
Average bitrate (kbps) 900
no other changes

Whew. Handbrake is an easy-to-use, cross-platform solution that is looking like our first choice to get these file sizes down.

Linas is going to do a survey to find out what the students are using and from there we can assist them on the phone and with screencasts.

Using Handbrake to re-encode large videos

As a sidenote, I had some difficulty with ScreenFlow capturing the Handbrake process. ScreenFlow was stopping the recording process on its own. Once I was able to capture the sequence I needed, the file was definitely corrupted during one section and that is definitely a problem. I think it has a hard time when the processors are cranking away on encoding video. I’ll still have to do some testing. ScreenFlow is new to me and I could have been doing something to mess it up.

ooVoo Testing

Linas, Molly and I tested out ooVoo tonight from our respective homes. I was connected via my wireless router hooked up to Comcast cable internet. The ABA program is using ooVoo for the Virtual Practicum course. It is a videoconferencing solution that features the following with a paid account: 6-way video chatting (paid desktop client to 5 un-paid web-based clients). The nice thing about using the paid account to generate a URL for non-members to use has definite advantages of ease-of-use and no client software installation. The browsers require Java and I’m sure there are minimum system requirements, but I doubt they’ll be a problem for the participating students.

When we first logged on, Linas sent Molly and I a URL to call his standard (unpaid) account. We fooled around with the settings and eventually had four computers connected (I had two on my side). The quality was awful to put it bluntly. Linas only had two bars on the video quality scale. We couldn’t figure it out since we both did network speed tests and found we had more than enough bandwidth.

In a last-ditch effort, I opened my desktop client using one of Ed Donovan’s paid accounts (psumi15) and generated a URL to share with Linas. The difference was night and day. We were able to chat normally and declared the test a success! I was even able to share my desktop with them, but the frame rates were pretty low (1-4 fps). I wasn’t able to send any files or text chat with them, but that’s not suprising given that they were connected via their web browsers. Twice, the video from my second laptop dropped out, but it only lasted for a second or two.

So, I think Dr. David Lee’s course should go well (knock on wood) as long as he has a paid account and no more than five students to chat with at one time.

Here’s a snapshot of the three of us chatting away: