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Tag: Demonstration

Authorship Investigate Demo

Published 1st November 2019

Had another demonstration of Turnitin’s new Authorship Investigate tool today. This time they came to visit us for the benefit of our head of service.

Further to what I’ve written about this before, new features or things I’ve learned today includes the fact that this isn’t integrated into either the VLE or Turnitin’s Feedback Studio which we currently use, but rather is a standalone application that only nominated individuals would have access to. This would typically be people working in academic misconduct departments who could use Authorship Investigate as a tool to help their investigations. Turnitin are, however, working on a kind of early warning system that could be used to identify papers which have potentially been procured through contract cheating / essay mill services, similar to the existing similarity report. Academics could then ask for those papers to be investigated further. This is, however, some way off at this time.

Some new things Authorship Investigate can use in checking papers includes citation styles, font and text styles, and the language of the document, e.g. UK / US English, and whether or not this has been changed or doesn’t match previously submitted papers by the student in question.

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Medial Version 6 Demonstration and 7 Preview

Published 31st October 2019

Photo of a video camera in the foreground, background blurred outPhoto by Kushagra Kevat on Unsplash

This morning we had a visit from our account managers at Medial to give us a demonstration of the new version of Medial which we will be upgrading to imminently, and to discuss future developments. Version 6 provides new video editing options, the ability to batch import and apply metadata to videos, improvements to the live streaming part of the system, and the various options which are now available for adding closed captions to videos – either machine transcription or more accurate, but much more expensive, human services. The player has also been updated to add variable playback rate, from 0.5x to 2x speed.

We also discussed the practicalities of integrating Medial into Canvas, especially now that we also have reVIEW (Panopto) which has overlapping functionality, and some further changes planned for their next release.

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Panopto Demonstration

Published 12th March 2018

Joined a web meeting in which a representative from Panopto demonstrated their lecture capture system as this is another area of interest for us currently. I already have some experience with Panopto from a pilot programme at Northumbria University a few years ago.

Using pretty much any standard webcam, Panopto can record lectures or workshops and the recording can be combined with a presentation in a web-based video editor. It can also be used for recording someone in front of their computer, much like the tool in the content editor of Canvas. Videos are stored on a private YouTube style repository which could potentially replace our existing media library, and video feeds can be live casted which is also something we use our media library for. One feature I don’t recall from my prior experience is the ability for students to add their own notes at specific time stamps which I like the idea of, and there is what was claimed to be a universal search function for any word or phrase spoken or shown on screen. I wonder if that has been tested with the unique range of accents we have in these parts.

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Medial Version 5 Demonstration

Published 31st May 2017

Following on from the webinar preview of Medial version 5 we had back in January, this morning we had a visit from our new account manager who came to introduce themselves and give us some more information about version 5, and Medial’s plans for the future.

Following our recent decision to adopt Canvas, we were pleased to get a demonstration of the Canvas integration which is functionally identical to the Moodle and Blackboard integrations. This works in a similar manner to the YouTube integration for Canvas which adds an icon to the textbox editor toolbar, but instead of embedding the video it returns a link to the selected file in Medial. There is an update for the integration due to improve this behaviour, inserting a thumbnail icon instead.

In addition to all of the work we have to do on the rollout of Canvas, we do have one eye open towards updating our version of Medial too. With this in mind our account manager discussed the available options which are to update our hosted instance, switch to a SAAS model, or utilise a middle way option which is SAAS for Medial itself, but then links into our own cloud platform, e.g. Azure or AWS, for content storage. Either of the SAAS models bring the benefit of scaling to meet demand, whereas our current hosted version of Medial can only transcode one video at a time.

I wrote about their live streaming tool, MEDIALive, before, but today we got a demonstration of it in action using the iOS app. MEDIALive can cast the stream out to YouTube and Facebook Live as well as Medial itself, and makes it easy to add in pre and post roll event videos.

Finally we were privy to some plans for version 6, which includes the ability to push videos added to Medial out to a YouTube channel also, and a new closed captioning solution which will give you the option for automated speech to text captioning, or human transcription which offers better results but is more expensive.

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Medial Version 5 Preview

Published 11th January 2017

Caught up with the recording of Medial’s preview of version 5 of their product from November on YouTube. It will bring improvements to the quality of video playback, which now defaults to the highest your internet connection and device can handle, and the player has switched to HTML5 by default, though Flash remains available to support the live streaming function and for users stuck on older devices.

A new feature is the ability to watch videos at 2x speed, a feature Rob was skeptical about but which people do want and will find useful. Teachers and admins now get more detailed stats on what people have been watching, the ability to set chapters to private or public, improvements to the live streaming and screen recording functions, and integration with Canvas. Live streaming is also now available to all users, not just system admins anymore, and can be done via an app for iOS and Android.

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Canvas Demonstration

Published 29th January 2016

Had a live demonstration of Instructure’s Canvas from an old Northumbria colleague, who is now at the University of Hull where they have just rolled out Canvas as their new VLE. It looks like a different generation system compared with what we’re using at Sunderland at the moment, LearningStudio, and the technical and customer support Hull has received has been second to none. For example, they are using PebblePad as their ePortfolio solution and Instructure built an LTI integration to link the two systems within days, free of charge. Other available integrations are extensive, and includes Mahara and Turnitin. The ‘Commons’ feature looks very nice, it allows people to easily import and publish courses from a central Canvas repository – it could be a good way to finally get some traction on OER use.

Other nice features include a central ‘Files’ area that allows content to be reused across different course sites; the ability to publish calendars to Google Calendar, Exchange and other calendar services; an online marking system provided by Crocodoc (which Blackboard added a couple of years ago); a fully functional student view mode; the ability to record audio and video from anywhere that uses the virtual text-box editor; a quiz tool with 12 questions types, including an equation editor; and a user masquerade function which works as well as Mahara’s.

There are some issues with it as well, of course. There is currently no SITS integration which is going to cause them problems if they want to gain some serious market penetration in the UK, but I am told they are working on this with Tribal. There is also no built-in conferencing or whiteboard tool, but there are integrations available for BigBlueButton and, I believe, Blackboard Collaborate which is what we currently use through LearningStudio. Mobile access was disappointing, as they have taken an apps approach rather than responsive design. There are three different apps available for iOS and Android devices which serve different functions, one of which is for audience response, which is nice. Support for SCORM and Storyline is a potential issue as they have had problems with it at Hull that we would need to investigate further. There is no integration for Medial (Helix) at the moment, though Medial do seem to be gauging the market in preparation for working on one. Finally there is cost, which, for obvious reasons I can’t say too much about. But it is more than LearningStudio. A lot more.

Overall the demonstration and discussion was a very positive experience. Hull are the latest UK institution to adopt Canvas, joining five others, so Intructure are gaining some traction here. In the US they’re storming the market! Check out the latest market share report from Edutechnica.

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Storyline Demonstration

Published 10th November 2014

storyline_demo

I’ve delivered a couple of training sessions lately where I’ve been plugging Storyline to people and how we can use it to enhance their learning materials. To help with this I have created a very comprehensive presentation showing all of the major features including all of the quiz and survey question types, interactions and screen and video capture options.

http://solar.sunderland.ac.uk/solar/file/f2dc20ce-f273-440d-b5ea-024e0cb9e0fa/1/story.html

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