digital lifeboat

It’s been a very intense week with presentation chat session held on Wednesday and leading a training session after work on Thursday.

 From a “project management” point of view I think it went well. I had foreseen this pressure point and planned the training session and prepared materials about eight weeks ago. Moodle training was a project under my sole control and it was easiest to get it out of the way first, while communications on the group work were building slowly. This gave me clear time to devote to the group work as it gathered momentum in the last few weeks.

 Of course one of the things this highlights is that we did not “project manage” the group work in as much detail as we might have. If we had put together a calender at the start that would have been helpful and revealed a slight dislocation in our schedules. One of the group working in FE and one in school with different term times for example, did slightly delay the work on the presentation.

On the chat session. All the group worked very hard and supported us by making very full and thoughtful contributions. Maureen and I were messaging each other furiously during the session to adjust and maintain our carefully scripted plan. So much so that I confess I did not take in much of what was being said.  But I think that for a first time it was not a bad strategy and ensured not too much empty space. I will need go back and read the transcript !

Have completed all the sections of my strategy document. Into the editing phase now on schedule for what I hope will be an early submission. I need to deliver this project ahead of schedule to fit in with holiday plans at home.

Lots of work to do to study the two presentations for next week and prepare feedback forms. Have to write my reflective report for the group work as well this weekend.

Better get to it then!

Note all comments refer to a specific installation of Web CT Vista, known as Victory at the University of Portsmouth and should not be taken to indicate performance of any other Web CT Vista installation. Although none of the issues I mention are unfamiliar if you check out the discussion boards at web ct.  

Been pondering on our experience so far of Victory as you do when you should be doing something else.

 Prompted somewhat by Terry’s note to the effect that Victory was an improvement on Web CT. I am not sure it is from the students side of the fence, so attempting to arrange a visit to the ” other side” to see what I can see.

But time to jot down some sort of overview of the “issues” it occurred to me. I have been blogging and posting widely to the effect that Moodle is far and away easier to use, and  admin that I can’t see how Web CT and other such VLE’s can survive. Then I found I was not the only person to come to this conclusion and in the same words nearly.

Athabasca University
CENTRE FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION
Online Software Evaluation Report
TITLE : WebCT: a major shift of emphasis
REPORT # : R41/0410
AUTHOR(S) : Barbara Morningstar, Jeremy Schubert & Kristine Thibeault
DATE : October 2004

available http://cde.athabascau.ca/softeval/reports/R4104102.pdf

Accessed 22nd April 2008

 From the abstract

The review compares the existing WebCT Campus Edition with the new WebCT Vista, and examines some of the problems associated with the migration to Vista at the institutional level. A

With so many comparable
open source softwares emerging for course management, containing more varied features than WebCT,
one has to wonder: how long can such costly proprietary products survive?

Postscript. I happen to know that they are now using Moodle as a work collegue is a student there and mentioned the fact to me this very day. She attended my last training day for Moodle, and had noticed Athabasca staff were about to attend a similar training day over in Canada.

Anyway to the issues in hand.

What are the usability issues that we had with the old Web CT? seems so long ago now I will go and retrieve them and make comparisons. A quick canter back to web ct reveals a catalogue of issues but not many with web ct itself. I recall we criticised it in comparison with other web 2.0 tools as lacking functionality, however it did seem to be a stable functional platform.

What are the issues that we are experiencing now in Vista?

 Who is online- a good idea in principle and one of the features I was most looking forward to trying out having been used to having multiple windows open to run MSN alongside other apps while working and chatting to other course members.

We found initially that on sending a chat invite to other course members who were on line they were not alerted in any visible way to the invitation so tended to log out before responding. Some students found it did not work at all, (possible issues with pop ups and Java versions which are affecting overall performance). When it did work, from time to time it shuts down and throws the occupants of that chat session out. This is  general issue in Victory, from time to time an attempt to upload a file or open a post will throw you out of the VLE.

Assignments area- I have documented the difficulties here in detail in previous posts.

Html editor- having worked almost the whole semester without this function. It has been a lot like watching black and white tv! Since I became a lurker on the web ct message boards picked up some solutions to test which worked. I posted  the following in technicolour following my first sucessful use of the html editor.

Tip 1 Make sure you only have one version of Java installed, go to control panel, add remove programs and check. It seems that Java does not remove old files when it updates, which is currently every few weeks, so you may find you have some old version accumulated since your last clear out, I found one.

Tip 2 go to control panel and look for an icon for Java. Click on the icon and look at the general tab, go to temporary Internet files and delete files.

I suspect this may have to be repeated from time to time for optimum performance. Well a bit late in the day but some progress for me, its been a very dull semester posting in boring type.

The whiteboard.- now this again looked like it had potential, but in practice does not work very well. Uploaded files come out very pixely and you can only use jpg, gif and some unique whiteboard format. Writing on the whiteboard seems easier now I have cleared out the Java cache but is still not easy.

Everything else seems pretty much the same as the old web ct, granted the look is a tad more modern.

Some benfits- editing of posts after posting. This is a real boon for many reasons, not the least my habit of rambling on, can go back and shorten posts!

I will add further benfits as I think of them!

Been a tough week with the difficulties in the submission of group work.

I have kept up with the strategy report and with coursework.

The only thing failing at the moment is the gantt chart. I still don’t feel I have time to waste figuring out how to learn the software. If i update it in the way I did before I will overwrite the previous data and loose it. So I am just looking at the chart each week to remind myself of any targets I set.  So far I am up to speed with all of them so there is not any difference slippage or gain on the original plan.

The report content is nearly finished. I will have to move some large sections to the appendix to reduce the word count. I left a lot of time (about two weeks) for editing as it will be very difficult to cover all the topics required in 6, 000 words.

There is an air of everyone with their heads down in the assessment process currently, not much of a sense of social interaction or communication. A reminder that it will all be over soon.

The group project ended with uncertainty of the purpose of the whole exercise. It seems that an element which I was not properly aware of was that of the website design itself. No one else from other groups has yet commented on what has unfolded over the last few days. To fully meet the intended criteria would have taken at least another two weeks. We could have pushed to get the content decided earlier had we planned for this.

In general assessment rubrics are very multi layered and not always written plainly. This sometimes leads to variations in interpretation within the course members. We have often had long exchanges in discussion threads over the meaning of some aspect of an assessment. It can be difficult to get the emphasis right.

 Some assessments have had very detailed breakdowns of criteria in table format, others are more narrative and complex.

 Post script to the last entry on group work. The upshot of all the difficulites in getting html versions of our presentation to run in Victory led to us posting a powerpoint presentation for our assessment to preserve the interactivity which was key for us.

 Having succeded, as I thought in getting the assignment in on time, I took a days holiday only to discover late in the day, that a flurry of communciation went on in my absense. This indicated that the Powerpoint might not fulfil the assessment requirements, and that an html version should be presented asap.

For the record Maureen was brilliant and worked on this during the day while I was blissfully unaware, and she has now managed to post a slightly ammended html version of the assignment. This version suceeds in bringing maximum functionality to the presentation regarding visibility of the notes, sound, and navigation.

The only addition which could improve this would be to have a link back to the correct slide in the presentation from the quiz pages. To achieve this the relative urls of the slides would have to be determined before re editing the quizes and including link buttons.

Maureen managed to figure out a methodoly for achieveing this and getting the links out from the presentation to work. Getting the links back would take another day’s editing and testing.

In victory assignments area it is difficult to establish the URL of a relative link. In order to do this she had to upload the two html quiz files, submit them, choose them individually as the start page, load the page in preview and copy the URL, go back one step choose the next file as the start page load the page in preview and copy the URL. She then had to amend the PowerPoint removing the action buttons which linked to the quizzes originally and replace with a simple hyperlink to the urls copied previously. She then saved the PowerPoint as mhtml zipped it up with all the sound and quiz files and went through the three stage submission and finally published it.

I note all this exhaustively to compare with creating somthing similar as a Moodle course. This would involve an upload of all the files followed by choosing the start file from a list. Any difficulties with file names can be edited on line. Relative links are easy to establish as you can browse to files within the directory in which you are building your course. Options to open in a new window can be set. Basically all the difficulties we have had would not have happened, and we could have built the quizzes in there too.

Anyway all in all using webct Victory has been an absolute pain. Give me Moodle any day.

Moved forward on the group work with a lot of communication between Maureen and I this week. Hit problems in several areas. I found I could not integrate files I imported into Captivate 3 from a PowerPoint, with the quiz I had already written. Took a whole day to figure out It was not possible ,by which time needed to find fastest solution possible, so reverted to PowerPoint with hot potatoes quiz. Oh well a steep learning curve there.

Then hit technical issues with web ct Victory. There seem to be intermittent upload, down load issues. Found the web page generated from pp would not display then suddenly hours later it did.

Altogether a rather 8 hour battle but we have something workable now. It would be even better if we can get some sound in but it may make the file too big and we have not got enough time left to get hung up on this now.