Small But Important Change to the Audio Chat Tool

The Audio Chat tool is kind of an underutilized wonder in online courses. For quite a few years now, all online courses have had this little tool which enables small groups of people to talk with one another from within the course Web site. You don't need anything other than your current Web browser and a microphone to talk to classmates from around the world. It's really quite handy, especially if you are working in a small group on a homework problem or wiki assignment.

One limitation of the Audio Chat tool has always been that each room (where you actually talk to one another) could only accommodate 5 people at any time. This was originally done so that students on dial-up/modem/low speed connections could participate alongside students on high-speed connections. Each additional person you put in an Audio Chat room causes more data to be sent to each participant in the room. If you're on a high speed connection, this isn't a problem. For students on dial-up/low speed connections, though, this was definitely a problem.

Now that less than 10% of all students who take online courses from JHSPH use dial-up/low speed connections (thank you, Google Analytics, for that information!), we're able to bump up the capacity in Audio Chat rooms. Each Audio Chat room can now accommodate ten simultaneous participants. This change is already in place, so you can try it out today!

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 3:45 PM - Categories: Online Courses | Course Tools

October 2009 Update to the Online Library

The Online Library in online courses has received a significant update with the start of the second academic term.

We've heard from many of you that the performance of the Online Library in online courses is a concern. We know that the application was not nearly as fast as it could be, and the developers here in the Center have worked hard to improve the loading and response time of the Online Library across the board. This update is 2-6 times faster than the current version of the Online Library, depending on the current task being executed. For example, loading the library in a course with about a hundred library items took 35 seconds in the old version of the library. In this version, it takes six seconds.

The Online Library still does not load instantaneously, and in libraries of a hundred items or more, that's simply not a reasonable goal. The performance of the Online Library is, like many pieces of software, also dependent on your computer. Newer computers with faster processors and more RAM are going to load and perform much better than a machine that is three, four, or five years old.

The other major change in this update to the Online Library is the introduction of the Audio Notes tool. This is a very cool addition to the library, and one that promises major impact when this version of the Online Library comes to CoursePlus.

Faculty, TAs, and students can currently use a tool like Audacity (or GarageBand, or any number of desktop applications) to create audio files for posting in their online courses or CoursePlus sites. This approach is actually a key part of the School's pandemic flu preparedness strategy. We, however, have created a simpler tool for recording audio and distributing it to students. It's no replacement for a desktop audio recording and editing solution, but it's drop-dead simple, and sometimes that's what matters most.

The Audio Notes is a very simple online audio recorder, almost identical to the one found in the Gradebook. Just as faculty (or TAs) would add a file or Web link to the Online Library, now they can also record audio, and have the MP3 version of that audio appear in the Online Library. They can edit information about that file, control the open/close date, and do everything else that they can do with any other file in the Online Library. Students can download the MP3 files just as they would any other file in the Online Library.

Here are some sample use cases for the Audio Notes tool:

• There is a real-world event that faculty want to comment on, but don't have time to get in to the studio to record a new lecture.
• Faculty want to give an overview of the results for the midterm or final, without having to type everything out.
• Faculty want to make a correction to their lecture or provide an update to their lecture, but the issue of time and the production process prevents this from happening to the actual online course lecture.  
• Faculty cannot come in to the School to give an in-person lecture for an onsite class, but students still need the content for that lecture.

There are some limitations to the Audio Notes tool that should be noted:

• The audio recorder is extremely simple. There are no editing tools. If mistakes are made, the person making the recording leaves them in or starts over from the beginning. 
• There are no limits on the length of a recording, although after approximately one hour of continuous recording, the connection to the server may become unreliable.
• Recordings are available to all students unless otherwise specified via the "Block Students" tool for that file in the Online Library.

If you want to try out the Audio Notes tool, please be sure that your computer is set up properly, per the tutorial for recording audio for posting in online courses.

There are even more changes in this update to the Online Library in online courses. These include:

• Opening of file/link edit boxes relative to your current position on the screen. No more scrolling to the top of the library to edit!
• If a file is uploaded to the Online Library that is a FLV, MP4 or MOV file, instead of downloading the file to the end user's computer, the file will be played in a new window which contains a simple video player. Students could rarely open FLV or MP4 files on their own because of the playback requirements of those formats. The Online Library takes care of this for them now.
• A few UI changes have been made to clarify the links to pages in an online course and to make it easier to select multiple students to block/unblock from seeing a file in the library.
• A handful of bug fixes including issues with open/close dates assigned to folders.

We want to thank everyone for their feedback in the past few months about the Online Library. We're listening and want to make it as good a tool as it can be. If you have any questions about these updates, or suggestions for further areas of improvement, we'd love to hear them!

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 9:02 AM - Categories: Online Courses | Course Tools

Another PDF Annotation Tool Available for Full and Part-Time Students

Last Spring, JHSPH Information Systems announced that they had acquired a site license for PDF Annotator, a tool that lets you annotate (write, draw, highlight, and otherwise mark up) PDF files. This is a really useful tool if you're trying to take class notes digitally or otherwise doing collaborative work using PDF files. Unfortunately, PDF Annotator is only available for the Windows operating system. Those of us using a Mac could use Preview, an application built in to the Mac OS, to do basic PDF annotation, but Preview lacks many of the features of PDF Annotator.

Recently, JHSPH Information Systems announced that they have acquired a site license for PDF Pen Pro, an equivalent to PDF Annotator for the Mac. This makes this tool available for free to all full- and part-time students, faculty, and staff here at the School. If you aren't enrolled in a degree program at the School, or aren't School faculty or staff, you can't take advantage of this site license.

For more information on acquiring either PDF Pen Pro or PDF Annotator, please see this page in the my.jhsph.edu portal. Remember: you have to log in to to the my.jhsph.edu portal using your JHSPH email account credentials to view this information.

Posted by Brian Klaas at 4:17 PM - Categories: General | Online Courses | Course Tools | CoursePlus

Reminder About Data Storage Policies for JHSPH eLearning Sites

At the start of each academic year, there are usually questions about the length of time which files in the Online Library or student submissions to the Drop Box and other eLearning tools are kept. The CTLT's data storage policy is as follows:

• Files in the Online Library are kept for three academic years. Therefore, a file in an Online Library for a course which was offered in March, 2006, is deleted from CoursePlus on June 1, 2009, at the start of the new academic year. A file in an Online Library for a course which was offered in September, 2008, will not be deleted from CoursePlus until June 1, 2011.
• Files submitted to a Drop Box are kept for two academic years. Therefore, student submissions to a Drop Box for a course which was offered in March, 2006, will be deleted from CoursePlus on June 1, 2008, at the start of the new academic year. Student submissions to a Drop Box for a course which was offered in September, 2008, will not be deleted from CoursePlus until June 1, 2010.
• LiveTalk archives are kept until the next offering of the course.
• Data collected and stored in a database, which covers all non-file-based data in CoursePlus and online courses, is kept for five years, after which time it may be permanently archived.

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 10:10 PM - Categories: Online Courses | Course Tools | CoursePlus

Small Change to News Flashes in Online Courses

The News Flash tool in online courses recently received a small update. Previously, you were quite limited in the formatting you could add to a News Flash. The formatting tools were also notoriously unreliable in anything other than Internet Explorer.

The News Flash tool now uses the same rich text editor that is used in other online course tools such as the Quiz Generator, Course Email tool, and BBS. This provides faculty and TAs with a richer set of formatting tools when posting a News Flash, should they need them.

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 4:07 PM - Categories: Course Tools

Changes to the Course Wiki Tool

The Wiki tool in online courses has received a number of updates for the start of the summer term. Most of the changes listed below have been the result of watching how faculty, TAs, and students use the wiki tool and making changes based on their use and their feedback.

The following changes have been made:

•  The wiki archives have been completely revamped. This includes:
  
  • Seeing a list of all wikis from all previous offerings of the course.
  • Making a fully editable copy of a wiki from a previous offering in the current offering of the course.
  • Making a read-only archive of a wiki from a previous offering in the current offering of the course.
• You can now insert a file automatically at the current cursor position, rather than having to separately upload and then link to the file.
• The insert file view has been redesigned so that adding or uploading a file to a wiki is now on the same tab. This tab has been renamed, simply, "Add File." The "Link to Outside File" tab has been renamed "Add Weblink."
• Faculty/TAs/instructional staff can now hide the display of a wiki on the "All Course Wikis" page. This only removes the display of the wiki to students on the list of all wikis in the course. It does not delete a wiki.
  • There is also a "Show All Hidden Wikis" option for faculty/TAs/instructional staff.
• The list of administrative actions which students can take on a wiki are now clearly separated from actions which only faculty and TAs can take.
• The rich text editor has been replaced with a newer, more robust rich text editor. This new rich text editor brings significant improvements to editing wiki content on the Safari and Firefox Web browsers in particular.
  
• The "Page Order" tool for wikis with multiple pages has been moved into the "Pages in this Wiki" box on each wiki page. This makes it more convenient to change the display order of pages in the wiki.
• The hierarchy of titles, subtitles and page text has been made clearer by changing font size and eliminating the redundant "Page Subsection" option in the styling controls in the rich text editor.
• Keywords have been eliminated from the wiki setup page. The wiki search tool will now search the text of wiki pages instead of keywords.

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 8:51 AM - Categories: Course Tools

New Features in the Class Email Tool

The Class Email tool in online courses has been updated with a few new features. The new features are:

• Faculty and TAs now have access to the archive of all class emails sent during previous offerings of the course.
• Faculty and TAs can now view all messages sent by the course instructional team in the class email archive. This means that any message sent by the course faculty, TAs, or instructional designer from the class email tool to anyone in the class can be seen by faculty and TAs. Students are still limited to seeing messages sent to the entire class in the email archive.
• Faculty and TAs can now opt to include a message sent to individuals (not everyone) in the class email archive so that everyone in the class can see that message.
• The rich text editor has been replaced with an updated, improved version.

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 10:06 AM - Categories: Course Tools