Creating and Editing Audio Using Audacity

We've been asked a few times about using Audacity to create and edit audio files - but sadly I've no time to create training materials.

But wonderfully there is plenty of help out there on the Web. GuidesAndTutorials.com have a getting started guide for Windows users, while Steve Sloan at San José State University has created an Audacity getting started guide for Mac users.

If you've got something a bit more advanced to do have a look at the Tutorials section of the Audacity Wiki.

And let us know how useful you find these tutorials and if you think there is anything missing - if there is a demand for it, we'll try and develop our own.

Out Of Institutional Control

Been reading an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about Northwestern University closing their own email system. Instead students get their email hosted by Google Apps Education Edition.

This article gets me thinking because often in Learning Technology Development we use similar freely available or relatively low cost services to create learning resources and experiences, or as easier to use tools than the ones available in an all-in-one VLE solution.

The things that we have to consider are:

Extra administration - Students might need accounts setting up (will the process put any of them off from doing this?). Can we support any problems the students have when using the service (the institutional VLE takes a massive amount of time to support just by itself)?

Here today... - How long with the services be around for? Can we back up what is created (for reuse, migration to another system, in case it needs to be shown in the future during an audit). If you created things in a more closed environment (e.g. Second Life) you might not be able to back them up as such. Materials in an environment like this won't have the lifespan of those 10 year old OHP slides that were still in use when I was a student. Is that seen as acceptable by the academic staff who use them, and those in management positions who will be allowing people time to keep creating resources?

This extra work can put people off using technologies, and that's not bad if it means the benefit of using the technology isn't worth the effort. I think some of the best and most innovative use of technologies in Teaching and Learning is done by people who are passionate about what they think can be done, and therefore put a lot of time, effort and focus into integrating it into their teaching. The worst uses of technology are probably by people who are told they have to use something, don't want to or know how to use it, and therefore don't integrate it's use into a larger strategy. There's nothing wrong with choosing to use 10 year old OHP slides over a Second Life meeting area, if they fit in with what you want to achieve.

Converting Text to Audio

The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning has articles in MP3 format. It's useful to me as I don't get much time to read, but spend ages walking to places. Perhaps we could similarly offer resources to students in multiple formats and a central copy of text to audio conversion software in Learning Technology Development, could be used for this.

I've looked at two pieces of software that can create audio files from text files. NaturalSoft's NaturalReader, and TextAloud from nextup.com. It's difficult to compare them completely as NaturalReader doesn't give you a full demo, while TextAloud does, but I can compare:

Quality of voices:
Both let you use high quality voices (e.g. AT&T NaturalVoices, VoiceWare's NeoSpeech) which we'd need to use, and both allow you to change the speed of the speech in the recording. NaturalReader allows you to choose which voices you have, including UK English which is nice.

Import Function:
Both allow you to import text, PDF, Word and HTML files to convert to audio.

Cost:
NaturalReader Professional Basic costs about $40 (£20), including a high quality natural voice, and NaturalReader Enterprise Basic costs $80 (£40) for 4 voices and a batch conversion function. Important if we were going to use it a lot.

TextAloud would cost $55 (£28) with 2 high quality voices.


So really there is not a lot between them as far as I can see. I'd like to test the NaturalReader Professional as this looks best value. If it was used a lot we would perhaps need the NaturalReader Enterprise. There is also a Developer version that can other applications can call on the command line to convert and batch convert files. This would be useful if we tried to put together an automated system, where perhaps staff could send in a text file and automatically receive an audio version back.

Basic Internet Security: Version 1.0

The Basic Internet Security guide for students without security software on their computers is now updated and on the Edge Hill University: Learning Services website on our guides page.

It contains information on useful free software that can help keep your PC safe from harm, and tips on other things that you can do.

Thanks for suggestions on how to develop it from people.

Methods of Distributing PowerPoint Files in WebCT

We've been asked about how to prepare PowerPoint files for use in WebCT.

Nothing particular has to be done to prepare PowerPoint presentations for use in WebCT, unless they are very large. For PowerPoint presentations with very large file sizes (e.g. over 50 MB) it is worth staff asking your contact in Learning Technology Development to run a copy of their file through a piece of software called Impatica for PowerPoint which reduces the file size.

If staff link to the PowerPoint presentation from an Organiser Page (e.g. the Homepage) they should set the file to open up in a 'New Browser Window' to enable the students to save or print the file.

Even then, occasionally some students have had problems saving or printing the files. This is because there are both browser settings and operating system settings that could affect how the file opens. Because of this some staff choose to set up a discussion area on the Discussion Tool and attach new PowerPoint files to discussion messages on there. This seems to work very well as the student has to download the file to their computer before opening it.

Video and Audio Files in WebCT (Version 4)

We're having more and more people using video and audio files in WebCT. There have been a few issues with student computers reacting differently, and the files not working for some.


The methods of distributing video and audio that seem to work for all students are:

1: Put the file on the streaming server. You'll need to speak to the Learning Technology Development officer that works with your faculty. This is the best solution for video files as they are large, and there is limited space on the WebCT server.

2: Add the file as an attachment in a discussion message. The students can download the file from there and listen to it on their computer or portable media player.

3: Add the file to a .zip file (in Windows right click the file and select 'Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder) and make the file available from an Organiser Page, for example the Homepage. Putting the file in a .zip file means that WebCT won't get confused by the settings on different computers, and will allow the student to download the file before trying to run it.

4: If you don't mind (or like the idea of) files that you've created being available publicly, you could host video files on a video sharing site (e.g. YouTube) and link to them from WebCT. For example Professor Alexandra Juhasz of Pitzer College is using YouTube as a central part of one of her modules.

An Introduction to Blogs and Podcasts: Video

A group from Lancashire County Council came this month to learn about new technologies that they could use in their work. As I was asked to do a session on blogs and podcasts, but as I was at ALT-C I recorded a screencast of the presentation for them, and then left some tasks for them to do.

This might be of interest to someone as an introduction to the technologies. I'd like to develop it further as a staff development session, but I'm not sure that most of the academic staff here really want to create podcasts. I'm even less sure that the students want to subscribe to them on a large scale. It might be better to develop staff development sessions about on-line audio and include podcasting as a small section of that.

Basic Internet Security

I was asked by a member of academic staff to come up with advice for the occasional students who haven't got anti-virus software or similar security software.

I wrote this document advising on useful software. I'm no expert on internet security so any feedback would be appreciated before I put it on the web site with our other documents.

ALT-C 2007: Looking Back... and Forward

Well it's OK going to a conference and hearing people speak... but how had that affected the way I intend to go about my role as a Learning Technologist?


What we using the potential of the technology for?

I think I've had time to reflect on how we work while at the conference - helped by talking to people in similar role. I see a clearer distinction between the work we do enabling administration using technology, and the work we do enabling learning using technology. I think that is an important distinction to use when talking with academic staff and will help us and academic staff keep away from investing all our time in what is really administrative work. Examples would be putting course booklets online, or using discussion tools for announcements. Even uploading learning resources that would otherwise be photocopied and handed out in class is using the technology for administration, rather than using it's power to aid learning in a way that photocopied documents couldn't.


Formative Feedback

Partly because it is part of the focus of my SOLSTICE research I noticed a lot about formative feedback, both the importance of it and potential ways of using computers to assist with this. I want to do a bit more thinking and reading in this area and then perhaps work with some staff creating learning objects. These might involve creating complex multiple choice questions for use in sessions with voting software, and for use on the VLE. It might involve games that give immediate feedback on actions, like the Traveller IQ Challenge game on Facebook.


Recording Lectures

Regarding recording lectures, I can better see that there is a definite limit to the amount of lectures we can really manage the recording of manually. If the institution wants to record all, or most lectures we'll need a automatic lecture recording system like Lectopia. I'm not sure of my opinions on the benefit of recording all lectures, but it has certainly been beneficial to record some, from an accessibility point of view.


Don't Be Scared!

Talking to people and listening to presentations, I feel a lot more comfortable about trying things on Mobile devices and in Second Life. Small projects might not be as time consuming in development and student support terms as I had thought.


It was well worth attending a conference to help me move these and other projects forward a bit. I hope next year I can perhaps present, and put a little more into the pot of ideas, as it were.

ALT-C 2007: Day Three - Automated Formative Feedback

Today I've been to the 9:00 session William Billingsley from the University of Cambridge and Pete Thomas from the Open University.

William was talking about the use of Intellegent Books and Massively Multiple Choice questions. Intellegent Books are an attempt to create a reactive learning environment (Brown, Burton and Bell, 1974). They give students feedback on their actions, perhaps calculating the consequences of a decision in a model simulation.

Massively Multiple Choice questions are an attempt to remove the possibilty of students guessing answers, and giving teachers a better chance at understanding how the student understands the topic, like what Dylan Wiliam was talking about yesterday.


Pete Thomas spoek about their work on automating the assessment of flow diagrams in subjects like computer science. Their ER Tutor Tool can work out how a students model of a process differs from the correct one and gives feedback on it.


In Conclusion

I've seen a lot this week about formative feedback and the potential use of technologies to automate the process or to simplify the process for the teacher. After what Dylan Wiliams said about remembering that the most important piece of the process is the teacher, and the teacher's skills, we should remember that the teachers need to do the designing of automated feedback alongside Learning Technologists (in a 'New Academic Team') who can advise from a technical point of view.

ALT-C 2007: Day Two - Formative Feedback and Mobile Learning Resources

Formative Feedback

This morning got off to a good start with Dylan Wiliam's Keynote about the importance of formative feedback, and how technologies can play a part in helping teachers with this task.
His work focussed on school children rather than Higher Education (see Inside the Black Box for details), but what he talks about relates to us in HE too.

Research shows that adding technology (for example whiteboards) to classrooms has no effect on attainment overall. Of all the things looked at the biggest factor is the teacher. Teachers who have developed their teaching skills over many years can help students much faster.
He quotes the work of Nyquist, 2003, on types of feedback and talked about how formative feedback was effective in promoting learning.

Wilson and Draney, 2004, have done work on creating multiple choice questions, for example with more than one correct answer, or questions that don't have correct answers as such. These allow teachers to get an idea of how the student is understanding what they have been learning. Dylan spoke about ways in which this feedback could be given instantly to a teacher in a class situation, allowing them to talk with students there and then about their understanding, help them develop better understanding, and get everyone involved in the classroom.

Voting systems kind of go there, but from what I've seen I'm not sure whether they tend to allow this more complex questioning. I'll have a look at Optivote, which we bought, when I get back to Edge Hill.


Mobile Learning

Creating resources for mobile devices has seemed overwhelming to me, because of the massive amount of devices and platforms. Therefore I was interested to hear Geoff Stead from Tribal CTAD talk about their work.

They have 2 main projects. MyLearning Author is software that allows teachers to create simple games/quizzes for mobiles. The Media Board is web based tools that enable the students to upload resources that they have created on their mobile devices to the web, either individually or as a group.

I'll need to look at this further, but I left this session a lot more confortable with the idea that we could create resources for mobile devices without spending most of our time supporting students with issues.


By the way, if you want to learn where Tanzania is, log into Facebook and have a play with TravelPod's Traveller IQ Challenge. That'a formative feedback in action.

ALT-C 2007: Day One - Podcasting and CMALT

So I'm at ALT-C, and here's what I've heard about today.

Keynote by Michelle Selinger, CISCO.
This was on at the unearthly hour of 9:30 :) Frances Bell was paying attention though.

Online Audio and Podcasting
Charlynn Miller and Leon Newnham from the University of Ballarat spoke about a project they had been doing related to online audio. This project involved incorporating a 5-8 minute audio recording into the Business Information Systems programme each week. This recording would cover what was to be learned that week and contain a FAQ section.

At the end of week 7, students completed a survey that they were given and it was found that 97% used the audio files and 90% said that they made the lectures easier to understand. From the server stats it looked like perhaps half the students were using the RSS feeds, although they weren't asked directly about this.


Someone from RMIT University spoke about a larger scale project where the audio from lectures were recorded by 6 lecturers in 7 subjects, covering 2100 students.

Their process involved the lectures having voice recorders, recording the lectures, and sending the .wav files to the technical team. The files were then converted to mp3s and made available both via the Blackboard VLE for download and via a podcast.

It was found that 51% of students used the files. Of these only 4% used the podcast feed, 14% downloaded files to Personal Media Players, and 71% downloaded the files to off campus PCs.

43% of students who used the files did so becasue they had missed a lecture, 34% to revise for exams and 23% to review a lecture after class. Interestingly 10% seemed to struggle with the sound quality, and there were issues surrounding the time it took the technical staff to edit the files, sort problems with lost equipment and low batteries... all stuff that we faced when we did something similar (see link)

They are currently looking at the Lectopia (now Echo360) system as something that will be more scalable that that time intensive manual system. I think that if we wanted to record a lot of lectures, we would have to use something similar.

Relating these presentations to us in other ways, it seems that students aren't using RSS feeds to syncronise media files with their portable media players. Perhaps more would if they had a good few podcasts to subscribe to - both produced in the institution and elsewhere?


Introduction to CMALT: Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology
CMALT is a scheme to enable professional accreditation for Learning Technologists. It involves a peer-reviewed portfolio of your learning technology related work being submitted, and if it meets their standards you gain accreditation.

This seems straight forward, and it is advised that the process of putting the portfolio together should take about 6-9 hours and be about 8 sides of A4 with hyperlinks.

The cost is quite high though. £95 for each attempted submission and you will be required to pay £80 per year for Certified Membership of ALT. That's where it lost me, otherwise I'd be saying that all the LTD team should go for it and Edge Hill should pay the £95. Perhaps if I start looking for work elsewhere, it might be useful to be a Certified Member of ALT though.


All in all I'm glad I've been to the sessions that Ive been to, but part of the benefit of coming to a conference like this is that you get inspired by the people around you and think of ways to move forward projects that you are already working on. That's definately happened here.

Google Earth

With the new release of Google Earth (4.2) , it might be worth taking a quick look at how we might use it in teaching and learning. George Siemens argues that this is the sort of inspirational resource that educators and educational institutions should be focussing our resources on developing, rather than focusing on Learning Management Systems.

The easy place to start is looking at what people are already doing with Google Earth, whether in formal education or not.

Brian Romans started a Where on (Google)Earth? Quiz on his blog. This developed into a community effort. People try to work out where the screenshots taken in Google Earth are from. For example here is an example of a question and an answer.

Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, USA is an example of an institution who have created a KMZ file which if you open will turn the campus in Google Earth into quite a complete campus map with 3D buildings, photos and annotations. You can learn about creating 3D buildings on the Google Sketchup site if that is of interest to you. Also you can add photos at panoramio.com; see the post on my experiences if you want to know more.

While there might be no reason for creating a campus map from a teaching and learning point of view, you might want to create annotations or use existing resources to bring an issue that you are covering in an academic programme to life. Google Earth Outreach has helped non-profit organisations work on this, for example those raising awareness of deforestation in the Amazon.

For more ideas, have a look at Google Earth Community discussion boards specifically the Educators discussion board.


Frank Taylors 'Google Earth Blog' is a great place to go to keep track of developments and uses for the software in the future. Subscribe to it's RSS Feed with your feed reader. If you don't have one and want to start subscribing to blogs, it is worth getting a Bloglines account.

More technical information can be found at Stefan Geens' Blog 'Ogle Earth' and at 'Google Earth Hacks'.

Sharing RSS Feeds with Bloglines

We've written quite a few posts about sharing information from RSS feeds (see RSS tagged articles) from allowing people to subscribe by email to displaying content of your feeds on your web site.

I think one of the simplest ways has been overlooked - that is creating a Bloglines account containing the feeds that you want to share, and setting the 'Show My Blogroll' option in 'Options/Blog Settings' to 'Yes, publish my Blogroll'. The NHS National electronic Library for Medicines have created a Bloglines account to do this. My own account can be seen too at http://www.bloglines.com/public/pfh.

This gives an easy way to allow people to keep track of a set of feeds by visiting your page. Alternatively they could download the OPML file containing your subscriptions (by clicking on 'Export Subscriptions') and upload it into their own Bloglines account. This would allow them to add and delete feeds to suit themselves.

If you're interested in following peoples thoughts on using technologies in teaching and learning why not download my OPML file, set up your own Bloglines account, upload the OPML file using the 'Import Subscriptions' link and delete the categories and feeds that you don't need. That's a quick way to get started building a library of RSS feeds of your own.

Producing Learning Resources on DVD

When looking at formats for resources that most students could access, DVD would probably be among them. If a module was producing a large amount of video and audio resources, I was wondering how realistic it would be to distribute them this way - or at least have this as an option when students were struggling to download resources.

We have software to burn DVDs and create simple menus - iDVD on the Macs in the LINC Building, Pinnacle Studio, Premiere Pro and Ulead's DVD MovieFactory. We've not got higher end software such as DVD Studio Pro and Adobe Encore anywhere here (as far as I can tell), so we couldn't currently create more professional looking DVDs with things like multiple language support.

The book Designing DVD Menus is available in Edge Hill Library and is a good introduction to the possibilities and challenges involved in creating DVD menus.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

The Common Craft Show have released another video in their Technologies in Plain English series, this time highlighting the power of Social Bookmarking.

Click To Play

The short video, (3.25 min) focuses on Del.icio.us, and simply illustrates how to get started and why you should want to. Another really great video - which is definitely worth watching.

The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning

I've been having a look at the new issue of IRRODL. This is a peer-reviewed Journal, which "aims to disseminate research, theory, and best practice in open and distance learning worldwide".

It's certainly has an international focus, for example the paper "Integrating Mobile Learning into Nomadic Education Programme in Nigeria: Issues and perspectives". This gives you a different perspective that just reading about stuff in the UK and US HE sector.

I really liked the fact that they've produced MP3 versions of the papers. These are computer generated, but good enough quality to listen to. The audio files are great because I'd never get time to read a journal like this but I've listened to a few papers in the gym this week on my MP3 player. It'd be even better if there was an RSS feed that allowed you subscribe to the MP3s as a podcast in software like iTunes, but there is a feed you can subscribe to that lets you know when each issue is released.

ccLearn: Creative Commons' Open Education Resources Project

Creative Commons is an organisation founded in 2001 with the aim of creating copyright licences that you can use to make it easy for others to share and build on your work. Some videos explaining it are available.

For example, if I has written some music that I wanted people to feel free to listen to and use in their own work (e.g. in videos) I could apply a Creative Commons licence to it. I could then make it available on a site with other music that has been given a similar licence. Examples of Creative Commons music sites are Jamendo and Magnatune.

Recently an educational division - ccLearn - has been started with the same sort of focus. It's mission is "minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers."

My hope is that this and similar projects that we could get involved with, will help us to use and develop resources that would otherwise be too difficult and time consuming to develop, by building on others work. For example the educational potential of games is very interesting (see James Paul Gee's book as a good introduction), but at Edge Hill we cannot really find the time to develop them by ourselves.

For more links and resources about open education resources, have a look at the Wikipedia OER page.

E-portfolios: Update

It's almost a year ago that I posted 'An Overview of E-portfolios' which I hoped would help us think through whether we would want to develop the use of e-portfolios, and if so how and in what areas.

Over the past year, several Academic members of staff have expressed interest in using e-portfolios - as far as I know all who talked to Learning Technology Development wanted to use a specific piece of software to do this, namely PebblePad.

Some of the interested staff had their projects funded by SOLSTICE, purchasing 12 month licences for using PebblePad so that pilots could be done - it will be interesting to see the outputs from these projects and what the staff consider was successful. I'll aim to share those on this blog.

In the 'An Overview of E-portfolios' post I also mentioned the institutional 'PDP Audit' which would affect our long term approach to e-portfolios and portfolios in general. As far as I can tell, this hasn't been completed yet. Again, when we know something we can share it here, along with how it might affect the use of e-portfolios.

Finally, if you're interested in e-portfolios, Graham Attwell (Director of the Wales based research organisation, Pontydysgu) has released a presentation called 'Eportfolio Development and Implementation' which is a good introduction to how and why e-portfolios might be used.

Using Speech Recognition Software to Help Create Accessible Resources

We've been working on creating more audio and video resources recently, and we've wanted to develop a process to allow us easily and quickly create transcriptions of them.

Transcriptions, we think, would be a step towards helping make resources accessible for all potential users. Not only that but it's nice to have a transcription so people can scan the contents to see if they want to spend time watching a video.

We've just purchased a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Preferred, which transcribes audio files in several formats:

.wav
.vox
.mp3
.wma
.sri

This is suitable for us as the software we are using for creating video (Premiere Pro 1.5) and screencasts (Camtasia Studio 3) both allow export of the audio as .wav files.

To test it I transcribed a short (134 second) video manually. This contained 391 words and took me about 20 minutes to transcribe (without any special transcription software or peddles).

Dragon transcribed this (before I trained it to recognise my voice) and it got 296 words right. After 30 minutes general training it got 308 words correct, and adding special words that I used in the videos but which weren't in Dragon's vocabulary pushed that to 311 words.

To correct this final file took about 10 minutes, indicating that this way of creating transcriptions would half the time it has been taking me to create transcriptions.

Spending 30 minutes training Dragon to recognise my voice raised the accuracy from 76% to 80%, which doesn't sound like much but I think would be worth asking staff to train Dragon if they were creating a lot of resources that were to be transcribed.

In conclusion, this doesn't look like it will make transcriptions almost automatic, and that would be important if we were to transcribe everything. However it will help us create transcriptions when we want to.

Looking online at transcription services, they charge from about £0.60 per minute for 1-2 speakers to £1.25 per minute for 5 or more speakers. Outsourcing to these services might be a good solution if we have too much work in this area.