Spark08 Website: Ways of displaying information on-line

We've finally finished working on the Spark08.com [note that they've made big changes to it now] website for the World Firefighters Games. The idea of the site is to connect with a younger audience (7 – 16 yrs old) encouraging them to explore fire and rescue services across the world and the World Firefighters Games via four national curriculum subjects: History, Art, Geography and PE.

This was a big thing to attempt in the very small amount of time available and while the site is far from perfect I've appreciated the chance to explore various ways of displaying information using various free on-line services. Using these services you can very quickly display information in more appropriate ways, and I've explored how we've used some of them below.


Google Maps: To display information geographically (example)
While you can do very useful and clever mashups using data sources and Google Maps if you have the technical know-how, anyone can use Google Maps to display their information.

Log in using your Google account and click on the My Maps tab. From here you can choose 'Create new map' and easily add placemarks containing the information that makes more sense displayed geographically.

Flickr: For displaying and annotating photographs (example)
We've used Flickr to display a series of photos as a slide show, which also displays information about the photo.

You can create slideshows in Flickr by creating a new Set from the photographs that you've uploaded. When you've done this you can click on the 'View as slideshow' link and link people to the URL of this page so that they can see the slideshow.

Xtimeline: For displaying historical information (example)
This allows you to upload text and related images that are best displayed by date.


Not all of these would be useful for your projects, but they provide a simple alternative method of displaying information that might be more effective than just text. As always when using external services keep a copy of the resources on a computer that you know is backup up, so you cannot loose it all.

Introduction to Online Tools for Teaching and Learning

There are many beginners guides to new web technologies, but I was especially impressed by Jeff Cobb's concise and well illustrated 'Learning 2.0 for Associations', which covers some of those that are becoming mainstream as well as the theory that is often linked with their uptake in teaching and learning.

The document won't take long to browse through, and if you want someone to talk to about how and where you might implement any ideas that you have, contact your local Learning Technology Development Officer. At Edge Hill University your current contacts are:

-Faculty of Health: Adrian Cain, David Callaghan and Lisa Bushell
-Faculty of Arts and Sciences: Peter Beaumont and Carol Chatten
-Faculty of Education: Paul Duvall and Megan Juss

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2008 Horizon Report: Future Technolgies and Trends

It can take many years from the early adoption of a technology until it is realistic for us to use institution wide in a Higher Education context. The Horizon Report (2008 Edition) by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative takes a look at six emerging technologies that are likely to see mainstream use over the next few years, as well as challenges and trends that will be faced during this time.

It's well worth having a look at the document - perhaps just go to the sections that interest you if you're short of time. Below I'll look briefly at how each might relate to our context.

Section One: Grassroots Video (1 year or less to adoption)
It is now easy to create, edit and publish video. Most mobile phones have some capability to record video, operating systems come with basic video editing tools and there are many online services that will host video for free. The wide uptake of broadband means that low bandwidth isn't a great barrier to people accessing the video.

All this means that it's becoming more realistic to incorporate video in educational programmes. It might be creating video resources for the students or asking students to create their own videos as part of their learning. As with any data (espacially external services) it is important for both staff and students to keep their work backed up in case there are problems with the service, but that shouldn't prevent the use of the technology.

How could this integrate with the VLE? If the video is hosted externally staff can share links via the VLE and the students can using the discussion tool on the VLE. If you only want videos to be available to the class in question, a service like Ning or eportfolio software like PebblePad make it easy for students to share various media inside a private social network site environment.

Section Two: Collaboration Webs (1 year or less to adoption)
Google Docs is one of many possible examples of web services that enable groups of people to easily work collaboratively on a piece of work, or easily share work. With Google Docs it would mean office documents, but other services allow work on other types of projects.

This collaboration has been something that staff at Edge Hill have experimented with over a few years. Generally it has been collaboration and sharing within a single class using a wiki or social networking site, but there is the possibility for classes studying the same subject at different institutions to perhaps work together. In fact due to licence restrictions with a VLE like Blackboard, an alternative like an external service would be necessary for collaborative work that involved people from outside the institution.

Section Three: Mobile Broadband (2 to 3 years to adoption)
While mobile phones are becoming more powerful and ubiquitous, I think that there is still limited benefit right now from us to try and make large amounts of resources more suitable for mobile devices. Our VLE isn't really designed with this in mind and that is a possible obstacle. However it's time to start small scale pilots (as some people round the institution are doing) and these projects will get people thinking about how we could be producing resources that would be suitable for mobile use. This will feed into larger scale decisions about future directions.

It would be good to hear what people are doing in this area. For example I know Media Development are looking at creating video suitable for mobile devices which could be accessed and used on field trips.

Section Four: Data Mashups (2 to 3 years to adoption)
Data mashups as we know them now still require some technical knowledge to set up. This means that it is not something that everyone can create themselves. However using services like Yahoo! Pipes and Google Mashup Editor they would be achievable for some staff. As we've seen with the other technologies like video, as time goes on tools will be available to make creation even more intuitive for non-technical minds.

The actual use of mashups in HE could obviously involve displaying geographic data on a map, and this is what many users are doing (see http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com). Other uses have explored various ways of visualising data, for example Gregory Chatonsky's Flußgeist / L'attente / waiting (2007) which mixes Twitter microblogs with Flickr images that have been tagged with a word from the post to create quite a hypnotic piece of art.

Section Five: Collective Intelligence (4 to 5 years to adoption)
Collective intelligence seems different to the other things on this list, in that it is less a technology that we might use and more a shift in a way of thinking that will affect us (perhaps whether we want it to or not). Because it is an international thing, it won't be Edge Hill University 'doing collective intelligence', it'll be something much bigger.

However ways in which we could use these ideas could be, for example, getting students to tag (Folksonomy) or write about how they used the books in the library (as well as other resources and experiences that have been involved with their learning). This collective knowledge would show the University and future students resources that would be useful for different tasks and areas of study and would work alongside existing more formal ways of organising information.

Section Six: Social Operating Systems (4 to 5 years to adoption)
This section covers the power of linking Social Networking Site technologies with Operating Systems. Operating Systems currently are focussed on content but not relationships. Social Operating Systems would make it easier to see who created resources, who they interact with and therefore to see other people doing similar work and research. This would enable you to read their work or perhaps collaborate with them. It would also make it easy to discover someone's complete body of work - similar to what some people want to use e-portfolios for.


It'd be interesting to hear from other people about how they see these new technologies and trends affecting us, and how we might best react to them and use them.

PGCTLCP Course: Blackboard Induction Videos

This will probably only be of interest to Clinical Practice participants, but we've created a recorded Blackboard induction both for those who couldn't make the induction and as a reference for those who did. It might be interesting for others outside the course who want to take a quick look at how Blackboard (CE 6) works.

We hope to develop materials in the near future that will be more generic and better quality, but for now:

01. Logging in - (1:33)
02. myBlackboard page - (0:58)
03. Homepage - (0:48)
04. Learning modules - (2:46)
05. Basic tools - (3:33)
06. Assignments tool - (2:21)
07. Discussion tool - (1:47)
08. Mail tool - (1:39)
09. Profile tool - (1:27)

Social Networking Debate: Does it bring positive change to education?

The Economist is running an Oxford-style debate on the use of social networking in education entitled "Social Networking: does it bring positive change to education?". It is happening between 15th January and 28th January 2008.

This has encourages at lot of interesting views to be expressed around the topic. While much as focussed on pre-Higher Education students, there is also plenty that affects us. If you're interested start by reading:

-The Moderator Robert Cottrell's Opening Statement

-Ewan McIntosh's opening statement for the proposition that "This house believes that social networking technologies will bring large positive changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom." He talks about the way that the technologies in question can be used to remove the restrictions of the classroom and to aid connections with the world outside.

-Michael Bugeja's opening statement for the opposition. He is concerned that technology is changing pedagogy and methods of teaching, rather than pedagogy defining the technology, as well as the resources required to implement these.

-Then move on to the comments and responses posted on blogs. Some of the responses talk about how the vaguely terms are being defined, and it does seem like the opening statements are referring in a very general way to web-based technologies in general and not addressing specific issues around social networking and networking sites.

A blog post well worth reading is Vicki Davis' It's about Educational Networking not Social Networking which is a really good overview of the debate and contains practical advice if you are interested in using the technologies.

Also Danah Boyd probably knows as much about on-line social networking as anyone and she has written a response which talks about pedagogical issues.

Survey Tools: for End of Module Surveys and the Like

We’ve been recently using The Form Assembly for creation of forms for end of module surveys and the like, because the WebCT survey tool was awkward to use.

However with our upgrade to Blackboard, Form Assembly’s re-development and the fact people in the Faculty of Health had been looking at, and are quite keen on Bristol Online Surveys, it is worth taking a proper look at how each of them compare.

We will look at the services from the perspectives of:

-Form creation, duplication and management among a large number of people
-Completing the forms
-Data management and analysis
-Financial cost
-Potential longevity of the service

by comparing re-creating a generic end of module evaluation form.

1. Form Assembly

See the example. If you have time you could make it look much tidier.

-Form creation, duplication and management among a large number of people

Form creation is very flexible, with the possibility for more complex features like conditionally released questions. The import list feature means that it is very quick to create a series of multiple choice questions which have the same replies (e.g. Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree).

Duplication of the form is easy as you can just use an existing one as a template. You can release your form to the public to use as a template, which means if several people at Edge Hill had accounts, they could share generic forms and change whatever questions they might want.

Several people could use one account and email notifications announcing when a form has been submitted can be sent to different email addresses for each form.

-Completing the forms

Very straight forward.

-Data management and analysis

This is affected by the plan you choose. The free plan doesn’t allow you to export results in CSV format, but it does create pie charts to display the results, and these could be printed or saved as a PDF. The paid plans allow export of the data in CSV or XML format.

-Financial cost

Visit the pricing page for all the options, but basically there is a free option where users are shown Google text adverts after submission, a pay as you go (e.g. £5 per 100 responces) and monthly subscription (e.g. £5 for a month/£60 per year). The paid service provides better options for exporting the results but even the free version gives notifications of new submissions by email or RSS feeds.

-Potential longevity of the service and any other things

Difficult to know, but the service has been around a few years and seems to be developing.

2. Blackboard Assessments Tool

-Form creation, duplication and management among a large number of people

The process of creating the questions is pretty straight forward – you create an assessment and then the individual questions. The only slight complications occur because the tool is to be used for quizzes too, which means you get more options that you need.

I could create the questions, but not separate them into sections with a title and instructions for each section as with Form Assembly.

The survey can be exported and shared amongst several Blackboard areas.

-Completing the forms

Pretty straight forward. Can save questions individually or all at the end.

-Data management and analysis

The tool does record your results, creating bar graphs and allowing you to download as a CSV file. However it is made slightly more complex because it is designed for quizzes and so you’ll also get grades given for correct answers, which you don't need for a survey.

-Financial cost

None as we are using Blackboard already.

-Potential longevity of the service and any other things

Created surveys will last as long as we stay with Blackboard. This survey tool cannot be used outside Blackboard for other uses, which limits it’s use.

3. Bristol Online Surveys

See an overview.

-Form creation, duplication and management among a large number of people

The creation of forms and questions is as quick and straightforward as Form Assembly. Duplication is easy as you can use other people’s forms as templates. Also you can create accounts for as many users as you want.

-Completing the form.

As simple as the other two services.

-Data management and analysis

Not used it myself but it looks like you can export CSV files of the data, and it will display results as bar graphs for you. It doesn’t look like there are notifications of submissions, but I might be wrong.

-Financial cost

£500 plus VAT per year for the institution.

-Potential longevity of the service and any other things

As the University of Bristol who created it seem to be using it I’d think it will be a long term thing.

Conclusion

The Blackboard survey tool (now called the Assessments tool) has improved since WebCT CE 4. As it doesn't allow surveys to be used outside of the Blackboard environment, we need to look at other options for the institution, however if you just want to run an end of module survey Blackboard is fine. If you like, download the Generic Module Evaluation that we have been using. If you have access to build your Blackboard area, go to the 'Build' tab, click on 'Manage Course', 'Import' and then upload the file and select it. This will import the questions and survey.

If the institution pays for Bristol Online Surveys you can create/copy something on there and link to the URL of the survey from anywhere including your Blackboard area. This is a good simple solution as long as there is someone in the institution to sort out administration of user accounts. It is academically focussed too, so seems to be developed with the use of research data in packages like SPSS in mind - although I've not looked at this aspect.

If you wanted more complex forms, with conditionally released sections and an RSS feed of results Form Assembly would be the best solution. This creates the best looking forms, especially if you spend a bit of time with it and can have multiple users using the same account, all receiving email updates of submissions for their own forms. It works well for simple forms too and is a very affordable solution.

Blackboard CE 6: Getting Started Guide

As several courses at Edge Hill are using Blackboard (aka WebCT CE 6) this semester we've made a getting started guide available to talk students through the process of logging in.

It's relevant to those at Edge Hill who might want to point their students towards it in inductions or course handbooks. You might want to print out copies to give to your students as Learning Technology Development will not be printing copies for distribution.

ALT-C 2008: Call for Papers

The Association of Learning Technologists Conference (ALT-C) is in Leeds in 2008, and they are now welcoming submissions of either research papers for publication in the peer-reviewed proceedings or abstracts for demonstrations, posters, short papers, symposia and workshops. The deadline for submissions is 29 February 2008.

ALT-C covers pretty much everything that you might call Learning Technology, and if you are using new technologies in teaching and learning there is a good chance you'll meet other people there who are doing something similar. I found it a good place to talk with people and consolidate ideas I'd been thinking about - but to do that you need to avoid spending all 3 days in sessions, or you'll just arrive back at work with a head full of ideas and no time to sort out what they mean to your future work!

To read of people's experiences at ALT-C visit Technorati, or read my posts from 2007 in Nottingham (day 1, day 2, day 3, after), and have a think if you've got anything to present there.

The Ecology of Games

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have released their series of books about Digital Media and Learning. Not only that but they've made them available to download free for those of us with little disposable income :)

The one I was interested in was "The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning", which contains a variety of articles which together are "pointing toward a more sophisticated understanding of the myriad ways in which gaming could and should matter to those considering the future of learning."

If you are seriously interested in using games, especially digital games in teaching and learning, this is a very valuable collection of writings by experts in their field.

I'd also recommend James Paul Gee's book "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" as an introduction to get you thinking about the topic. There are some copies in Edge Hill's Library and a revised edition out in April.

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Screencasting: Install Camtasia 3 for Free

If any of you are wanting to have a go at Screencasting, you can download a free version of Camtasia Studio 3 at the moment.

Earlier in the year I created a series of screencasts that goes through how to use the Camtasia software technically, why you might want to use it in the first place, and details of good practice. These are available below on the streaming server and YouTube. They might be useful to get you started.

01. Introduction - Streamed wmv / YouTube (2:14)
02. Installing the 30-Day Trial Copy - Streamed wmv / YouTube (2:15)
03. Choosing a Microphone - Streamed wmv / YouTube (1:00)
04. Starting a Recording - Streamed wmv / YouTube (2:13)
05. After Recording - Streamed wmv / YouTube (1:00)
06. Producing a Sharable File - Streamed wmv / YouTube (3:11)
07. Hints and Tips - Streamed wmv / YouTube (2:37)
08. Accessibility - Streamed wmv / YouTube (1:16)

If you're at Edge Hill and you decide you want to use screencasts in your modules, get in contact with us here at Learning Technology Development. We're based in the SOLSTICE centre and you can arrange to come in and use the decent quality equipment and microphone that we have here for creating screencasts. Trust me, it's worth making sure the sound is of a high quality. Otherwise the experience of using the screencasts can be a painful one for the students.

spokentext.net - More Converting Text to Audio

Following on from the post on Converting Text to Audio, there is a fantastic service at spokentext.net.

This service allows you to upload a file (be it .txt, .pdf, .doc or .html) and it converts the file to .mp3 for you. The voices are OK, but it's the small things that are the best part about the service. You are provided with an RSS feed, meaning that every document that you convert becomes part of a podcast. You can subscribe to this in iTunes for example, and that will sync to your iPod if you use one.

Also there is a Firefox extension for it. Install the extension and you get a tool bar.








Select text in the web page that you are viewing, click the 'Record Selected Text' link, and it will add an audio version of the text to your podcast feed.

Using the Firefox extension and the RSS feed make this a very easy way of keeping consuming textual materials on your portable media player while you are on the move. It is free at the moment, but if you'd like to help the development of the service they are asking for donations to help pay for better voices.

Using a Social Network instead of a VLE: Getting Started

We've set up a Social Network on the Ning.com site for one of our modules, to help the students share their work with each other and keep in touch during the module and the module placement.

We have an area for them on the institution's VLE, but Social Network sites work differently meaning that in some situations they are a better option for a class.



Social Network or VLE?

Our first decision was whether to focus the students on using the VLE or a Social Network area. The main differences are:

1. In our VLE (WebCT/Blackboard CE) there are limited options for students to add content easily. Many Social Network Services make simple, and empower the students to share, create and communicate more.

2. Students have to be invited to the area, and then set up their own accounts. This is an added level of complexity for them over having an institutional account to log into everything, but none of the students who started using the area today had a problem and it only took them half a minute.

3. You can subscribe to RSS feeds detailing activity on the site. Although not everyone uses feeds, if you follow a lot of sites there's no good reason not to! If the VLE that we use had RSS feeds of updates, it would make it much easier to follow what is going on in each area.

Why use Ning?

There are many different social networking sites, and they are all different. This means the interaction of people in each of them is different. We’ve chosen the Ning social networking site to test at Edge Hill because:

1. We wanted people to be able to join the private group without accepting the module leader as a friend. This seemed to be the case with Facebook (let us know if there are any settings to change this). We thought that students might not want to accept their tutors as a Facebook Friend as this gives them access to your updates about what you are doing and photos. Using Ning feels a lot less intrusive into students private lives.

2. The groups can be set so that the module leader (or whoever set the group up) accepts requests for membership of the group. This means that they can keep control of access, but students can still take the responsibility to join themselves.

3. Once students are members they can use the Video tool to share videos, the Music tool to share audio, the Photos tool to share images, the Forum to share ideas and attach documents. The module leader can send out notices via the Blog tool. This covers everything that they might want to share.

I'll try and write an update on how this Social Network was used, to see if there is anything that we can learn from it for the future. I think that using Ning is much more likely to encourage informal learning networks and connections that would benefit learning.

I've just watched Sugata Mitra's talk at the Lift conference about his work with kids in remote areas of India. Basically PCs were installed in a wall in a village and the kids who'd never seen a computer before, all helped each other learn to surf the web (including learning English). It's well worth watching as it goes to show the power of informal learning networks when people have something (like the internet) that empowers them, and they connect together to help each other learn.

Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations Conference

Been having a look at the 'Corporate Learning' conference that is going on at Complexitive.com.

This is a free online conference that is being run using Elluminate Live! and while some of the sessions are very focussed on business, I think that there is a lot that Higher Education can learn from the group of people involved.

Have a look at the conference wiki to see a list of past recordings and future presentations that you might want to attend (add 6 hours to the time if you are in the UK).

This got me wondering; how is what corporate educators are doing, different to Higher Education's focus? Elliott Masie points out at the SCIL Conference, 2003, there are a lot of similarities in at least how on-line content and experiences are (or should be) developed.

I certainly hope that, in the future, developments that we do will be part of projects, with plans and service level agreements - more like what I've seen in the business world. Most developments I see in HE run much more informally. I think when SOLSTICE pushes the idea of New Academic Teams this project based approach will be an important part of making it work. The plans would also have to take into account invisible costs like levels of student support, and maintenance which tend to be ignored.

Social Networking Sites in Education

I'd say using Social Networking Sites in education is the big topic of the day in Learning Technology. I'm in the process of setting up an area on Ning for a group of students on placement to use right now.

Dana Boyd is one of the leaders in the academic study of Social Networks and if you're interested in joining the debate about how they could/should/shouldn't be used it's worth having a look at Dana's blog (see the best of page if you're short of time).

If you're interested in current research have a look at the most recent issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. This journal presents a lot of research relevant to those using communication technologies in education, and this issue covers research on Social Networking Sites in detail.

It's worth subscribing to the Journal's feed if you have a feed reader - and if you've not sort yourself out a Bloglines account or use Feedblitz to get email updates. Just go to the bottom of the Feedblitz homepage and add http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/jcmc as the website address.

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.