Videos as infonuggets

Gold Nugget, No known copyright restrictions

I’ve been spending some travelling time thinking about engagement of students with video content. I have written previously about accessing educational videos on mobile devices during such time. But one drawback I have found is the dropping out of the mobile signal during a 20 minute video. Then I got to thinking, is this really the sort of video length to be watching when accessing via a mobile on the move? If you are on the bus, train or tube for half an hour then maybe. If you’re a student and have five or 10 minutes to kill walking across campus, or waiting for a lecture to start then probably not. Also, I’m personally finding that five minute chunks of video makes the content really accessible.

I thought back to the GALT Event in March and TED-Ed introduced by Mel Lindley. I’ve started watching (or rather listening to and semi-watching) these ‘bite-sized’ ‘info-nuggets’ and I’m liking them. Maybe it’s just the way I am, but I find it a really useful information access process. I’m often wanting to follow up (and do when I have time later) on the material I’ve just seen or heard. So in that respect it is certainly working for me.

Considering this approach I was reminded of the concept of microfilms that I read about in Sept 2013 that is very popular in Asia. These are very short films that people watch on their mobile phones whilst commuting. There is a whole industry of creative people developing around this concept. The barriers to entering the production side of microfilms is also very low. Maybe we’ll see more educational microfilms being created. Possibly this is something to try getting students involved in.

What are your thoughts? How do you like to access information on the move? What is the ideal length of an information video? Leave us a comment.

Microfilm Links:

http://www.hktdc.com/info/mi/a/hkti/en/1X09RWZD/1/Hong-Kong-Trader-International-Edition/Micro-Movie-Business.htm

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/entertainment/2012-05/21/content_15342357.htm

https://www.facebook.com/TheBestMicrofilms

Sharing your Google Docs and Presentations with /preview

Google Docs has many 'hidden tricks' that can help with your productivity, collaboration, and presentation. The aim of these short tips is to reveal such tricks to enhance the learning and teaching experience. I also intend to produce and share a set of 'short tip' documents.

Publish with /preview

By default, the URL you see for a Google Doc ends in /edit. This is the ‘edit view’ of that document, whether you have provided editing rights or not. If you just want someone to read your shared document without editing or commenting then send the link with /preview replacing /edit at the end of the URL. This provides a read-only version to the recipient, which loads faster without distracting menus and buttons, and has pagination.

Doc with /edit in the URL.	Doc with /preview in the URL.

MOLE Update

We are pleased to announce that we are moving to a brand new service delivery model for MOLE.

Rather than being hosted on our own servers at the University, MOLE will be hosted by its suppliers, Blackboard, on their servers in Amsterdam.

All content will be migrated across by CiCS working closely with Blackboard, and staff and students will notice no difference in the user experience.

One key difference however, is that in our new service model, Blackboard will provide 24/7 support and maintenance for the running of MOLE. This means that if their monitoring equipment detects poor performance or unusually high utilisation at any time of the day, they will immediately channel additional resource where it is needed so the user experience in Sheffield does not deteriorate. We expect that this will avoid a repeat of the MOLE performance problems we experienced at the start of this academic year.

With this new service delivery model we are hopeful that MOLE will meet the needs of our academic colleagues and their students. The Learning Technologies team in CiCS will now be able to focus their efforts on supporting academics to use the features of MOLE to produce innovative and engaging online content to provide our students with the best learning experience possible.

Serendipitous route to Milq & beyond

I enjoy the world of serendipitous discovery of technology for learning and teaching uses. I looked over the recent Twitter email telling me things that I might be interested in. One was a Tweet from Mashable about Milq.

Milq instantly struck me as an interesting concept. It’s a user-driven curation system that potentially could help you organize the web. Launched in April after a year of beta it appeared as one of Apple’s Best New Apps.

A Milq user poses a question, and this constitutes a Bead. Others respond by posting videos and audio clips.

I can see the possibilities for education of a community of users offering up useful material. This is a way of tapping into what others, interested in the same topic, are finding informative. It’s a way of dipping your head into the information stream without it being ripped off, or at least developing your own tributary. I can see parallels with a curation community developed in Diigo for example, but it seems more dynamic. Also it feels like a more intuitive way to follow items that might appear via Google+.

On using Milq, I immediately started looking for examples of Education curations. First I found the CHANGING LEARNING? bead.

Screenshot of 'Changing Learning?' bead from Milq

Then I tried the search function. That led me to Paul Anderson’s ‘Classroom Game Design’ at TEDxBozeman video where he talks about engaging students using a gaming approach to the classroom. Paul also talks about the need to allow failure to enable learning and growth to happen. This links in nicely with my previous post about #safefail.

Milq definitely looks like one to watch. I like serendipity.

Article Links:

Twitter https://twitter.com/

Mashable article http://mashable.com/2014/06/08/milq/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link

Milq http://milq.com/

Milq tag search #education http://milq.com/tag/education

Milq on Apple iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/milq/id640771730?mt=8

App Swap Breakfast #2 Curation Tools

The second App Swap Breakfast (ASB) took place with CiCS and looked at curation tools. As with the first ASB there was a good turn out with lively discussion that looked a few more issues relating to the use of apps and smart devices in the University. One issue that had arisen before the second ASB was that of presenting apps on a big screen. Many staff had experience of presenting slides and Web tours using their tablets and smartphones remotely using such as Haikudeck and Nearpod amongst others. Actually projecting apps onto a screen is not so straightforward but luckily a kind soul in our Corporate Information and Computing Services sourced us a cable for our iPads in time. It raised another of many questions, what cables, projectors and other infracture does an organisation need to do this fluently? Does it need cables given we are increasingly able to present wirelessly? For our session to get the apps on screen we did need a cable, but another question had arisen in my mind. How can we screencast and capture apps, especially when trying to demo them? Recently Apple announced that this will be possible on their new Yosemite OS, although early tests showed it was still not perfect for capturing apps. Even sites like Techcrunch and their tech reviews still often have a person holding the phone or tablet whilst showing the app to camera, but hopefully that will all change. That said, this approach is not all bad.

At the ASB Daniel Villalba Algas from the Department of Politics explained how he used Evernote to capture everything from meeting notes to useful Web links. Evernote is a simple note taking application that is available in a range of different devices, it is even available on the University's managed desktop.

Daniel explained to the group and writes below that he uses Evernote to take quick and simple notes that he later uses to produce more complex documents. Daniel listed some of the key benefits of the app:

• It allows you to record one hour of sound for note so if you are going to a meeting or conference you can record the sound while you are taking your notes. Daniel said that he was aware of his department’s students using it to record lectures while they are taking notes.
• You can also attach images to a note if it is easier than typing.
• With all these systems it is useful if you can sort and manage your notes and in Evernote you can create notebooks, tags or even link a note to a specific location so it makes it very easy to find the notes that you are looking for even by using geographical information.
• Comments are stored in the cloud so you can always have access to them regardless of the device that you are using.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/evernote/id281796108?mt=8

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evernote

I looked at two tools I have championed for the last few years that help teach students and staff how to organise and manage their research papers.

Mendeley

Mendeley is a social reference management tool that has its own alternative metric for measuring scholarly papers. The application is available across most platforms as official and unofficial versions, with a desktop and Web version being the mainstay of the software. The mobile version sits in between both versions in terms of functionality and usage.  For any student or researcher working on the go and in possession of a tablet the app allows them to save new references and attached PDFs with the option to read them. Unlike the desktop version there is no option to annotate or highlight the PDFs, but nevertheless it is a useful reader. Users can tag references and access their references and papers within their groups.

The app is free and has an official iOS version, whilst there are unofficial Android versions, Mendeley say they are working on an official version. There is also a version for the Amazon Kindle which allows you to read papers in your Mendeley database.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/mendeley/id380669300?mt=8

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kmk.Referey

http://www.kinsync.com/

http://dev.mendeley.com/

The next tool I looked at was Readability which is more of a PDF reader than anything. The real value from Readability is by using it on your Web browser as it allows users to turn webpage articles into clean looking PDF type articles that you can read offline on your tablet device. Readability is able to turn a website from the one below into the pdf below that. It is a great way to stockpile interesting articles you may discover browsing the Web or Twitter and turn them into a reading list.

https://www.readability.com/apps

Before Readability

Afterwards

Claire Beecroft talked about two apps she uses to create and discover materials as part of her teaching. Claire captures below what it is she likes about these two apps; firstly the micro-podcasting tool AudioBoo and the journal browsing app Browzine.

Audioboo:

Audioboo appswap - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Audioboo is an app for Android and iOS and can also be used via a browser. Its free. You can record up to 10 mins of audio and embed the results in a neat little player in MOLE (Blackboard). Great for distance/blended learning, i.e: introducing a module, LO’s or a discussion topic, or for setting assignments or doing topical things related to current affairs.

audioboo.fm

Browzine:

Browzine is an app that allows you to ‘browze’ the e-journals at your institution. It links to the Uni’s e-journal subscriptions and allows you to browse broad subject categories for journal titles, then more specific sub-categories. Nice for current awareness and a more serendipitous approach to search. Reminds me of the old days of directories like Yahoo. http://thirdiron.com/browzine/

The third App Swap Breakfast will focus on sound and vision and will hopefully take place in July

Divided We Fall?

Divided Highway by Steve Snodgrass  (CC BY 2.0)

I’m often reminded about how lucky I am living in the UK. One reason being the thought provoking content that is frequently available on BBC Radio 4. Four Thought is one such programme. It consists of a series of 15 minutes talks where speakers introduce their thoughts about ideas and interests affecting society.

The speaker on one recent programme was Dr Mark Graham. He presented some insights into the geographical information divides that exist across the planet. For example, did you know that the USA and UK together publish more scientific journals than the rest of the world combined? Or that 80 percent of registered internet domains are to people in Europe and North America, with only two percent to people in Africa? Mark points out that 10 years ago only about 10 percent of the world’s population was online, whereas now something like three billion people or over 40 percent of the world’s population is online. Even so there is still vast information inequalities.

Mark gave examples from Wikipedia. He says that

“The vast majority of articles come from Europe and America and the vast majority of articles are about Europe and America.”

“There are more articles written about Antarctica … than most countries in Africa …”

With regard to languages

“More articles are written in Finnish (spoken by five million people) than Arabic (spoken by 280 million people).”

And with regard to gender, Mark says that the guess is that fewer than 15 percent of Wikipedia editors are female. This can lead to a gender bias in the discussion of subjects. [Aside: Only today research has emerged about the unconscious gender bias of hurricane names leading to increased fatalities. (Refer to http://time.com/2813381/hurricanes-female-names/ )]

Our digital tools are amplifying the already most visible, most prominent examples. As educators and students we need to be aware of this and try to remember these biases and also what has been left out. We particularly need to remember where information originates as the MOOC phenomenon takes hold.

To listen to the full BBC Radio 4 Four Thought visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0435j93

or watch Mark’s TEDx Talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33kIWwQZ5I0

See my set of Diigo links to Dr Mark Graham

https://www.diigo.com/search?adSScope=my&what=markgraham&snapshot=no

The Four Thought website is available http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010q0n0

Persistent Learning: Learning about Lecture Capture at the Echo360 Conference

Last week (May 21st 2014) I was fortunate enough to attend the 2014 Echo360 conference (#emea14) in London. It was a well-supported event with many of the US team in attendance as well as participants from all over the UK, Europe and the Middle East. Recent years have seen a lively debate about the usefulness of lectures in Higher Education (see 'Ten reasons we should ditch university lectures' (Guardian Higher Ed, Th 15th May 2014)), but this conference helped to show how the lecture does have a place in contemporary education. 

Seamless automation: Our first talk was from Martin Hill from Curtin University in Australia. The University has invested a huge amount in lecture capture, using Echo360 rebranded as iLecture. They are now undertaking 200-300 recordings per day. 150 venues have Safe Capture HighDefinition (SCHD) recording boxes and they have had more than 2 million viewings of recorded material in the last year. The highlights of this set-up were:

• Lecture capture is automated in many places. It ties in with the timetable, so that no one has to press any buttons. The capture begins at the start of the time and finishes at the end and the final capture is uploaded into the educator’s Blackboard course within 1.5hours of the end of the lecture.
• They have worked hard to get the best quality video they can and some cameras are capable of tracking the lecturer, so if he/she moves about, it is all captured. This can be enhanced with pressure pads which also track the movement of the speaker. They are experimenting with a camera which can also watch the audience, so that if an activity takes focus away from the lecturer, the participants can be recorded and one of the cameras can even zoom in on a speaker. (Polycom Eagle Eye Director). 
• They use wearable microphones that are chargeable for up to 8-hours of recording without tethering through wires to a computer. (See Revolabs wearable microphone).
• Many of the lecture theatres have a light (Delcom USB light) which will indicate that a recording is taking place. The recording can be paused, simply by pressing the light, which changes colour. The light can also give a visual, flashing indication that the recording is about to finish, helping the lecturer stick to time.
  
• Whilst many of the processes are automated, you can also book sessions or alter existing sessions through a simple form, which is also handled automatically.
• Students can also make recordings using the personal capture software.
• The University has set up some specialist recording spaces, with a particular focus on 'clinical' or 'professional' spaces, for courses such as nursing, social work and pharmacy. These spaces allow students to role play interactions which can then be reviewed and critiqued. 

For me, the key word that came through from this was ‘simplicity’ – it has to be simple for the end user (not necessarily for the behind-the-scenes folk) and this set-up would seem to achieve that. The statistics given in the session spoke very clearly about how useful the students find the service and it is a ‘value-added’, which so many students now seek in the UK.

Persistent Learning:

The title of this blog was taken from a session delivered by Bill Holding, Executive Vice President of Echo360, which outlined their development plans and a new product, due to be launched during the summer. This is based on their previous ‘Lecture Tools’ software and will be called ALP – Active Learning Platform. It aims to give a ‘before, during and after’ lecture service for all students and academic staff, covering:

• Capture and Remote Learning 
• Student engagement
• Instructional content management (CMS) 
• Learning analytics and dashboard

The capture and remote learning is already something that we have available at The University of Sheffield.

The student engagement element features ways that staff can ask questions and students can respond. There is a facility for students to take notes into an Echo360 notepad that tags the time the note is taken. This makes it very easy for the student to go back and re-watch the video at the exact point where they took a note. Students can also ask questions through the system, so they would type their question into their laptop/tablet and it would appear for the tutor. They also have an ‘I’m confused’ button to indicate points at which they are finding it hard to follow and there are bookmarks so they can remind themselves of parts to watch again. There was some concern raised from the floor about bandwidth demands of such a system if every student were to be using a device during a lecture.

Staff can obtain a wealth of data – which videos are watched? Who is watching them? Which parts of the videos are the most watched? Which students are interacting with the questions asked? A combination of factors (which can be defined by the lecturer) will combine to give an ‘engagement score’ for each student. See the next section for information about how one lecturer is using his student data.

Overall, the system will definitely be of value and takes the traditional lecture to the next level. The availability of lectures online is something that students are almost beginning to expect. The option to ‘live webcast’ means that you can deliver a lecture to a lecture hall and to a distance audience at the same time. Students no longer have to be in the lecture theatre and, for a variety of reasons, the anywhere learning solution will suit some students.

The University will be finding out more about this system, but we would love to hear your views on how useful it would be to your department. Contact us on myecho@sheffield.ac.uk

How learner analytics are improving retention: The final session was a lively, entertaining and informative session by Dr Perry Samson, Head of Teaching Innovation at Echo360 and a Professor of Meteorology at the University of Michigan. He explained that in the past he would not know until an exam whether a student had a problem with a course. Now, using lecture tools, he has been able to identify much sooner when a student is struggling.

His courses can be delivered in three ways: 

• Attendance at a lecture 
• Attendance at a lecture remotely via live streaming  
• Watching a recording after the lecture

Dr Samson wanted to know what impact these modes of attendance and the way in which students participated was having on their final grades. There are some surprising findings:

• Most students do not believe that the presence of laptops in class provide a distraction. 
• The outcomes are not related to attendance – it does not matter where or when the student watched the lecture.
• Most students feel that their learning is enhanced by having a computer in class. 
• Student outcomes are related to their level of participation in a lecture (as assessed by their responses to questions asked)
• Student outcomes are related to the number of correct answers they get in class. That is, students who do not get correct responses in class also do poorly in the exam.
• Students’ physical and emotional well-being affects how well they are doing. The chart below was generated by students placing a cross on a chart using their own mobile devices. The findings are no surprise to me and relates strongly to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs). Dr Samson said that was good to be able to identify these students but hard to know how to support them. 

The tutor can see how many notes are taken in class. The more slides that a student has where they take notes, the higher the grades were.

Whilst these findings only represent a group of students on one course in Michigan, it is worth noting that the trend towards using student analytics is one that is growing. It has long been a feature of school education (https://www.raiseonline.org/About.aspx) and the question one needs to ask here is how much should an HEI monitor the performance / engagement of adult learners? That is a big question with many reasons to do it and some reasons against. However, if it is deemed to be desirable, then the Echo360 system is a good one to consider.
The big question about the usefulness of lectures will long be debated, but the evidence from today is that a recorded lecture is far more useful to most students than an unrecorded one.