Rowin’s blog

Despite being a distributed organisation that frequently works with people across the UK and beyond, we’ve never looked very hard at running meetings and events online.  Environmental concerns, tightened budgets, and simple practicalities such as overly busy schedules or arranging work cover or childcare are issues we and those we work with regularly face, and so we felt that the time was long overdue for us to take our first steps in online conferencing.  We’ve been looking at various tools available with some interesting results, and we thought it would be useful to share them with you.

Our requirements

We were looking for something that would allow voice, text, file sharing, presentation abilities, with minimal support needed to set up and run it.  We were happy to use a paid-for service if it met all our requirements and wasn’t wildly expensive.  We tried three systems, and considered but rejected a fourth without trying it.

The one we looked at but didn’t try was FlashMeeting from the Open University.  Although this is a well respected and popular system, we were looking for something we could use for both internal and public events and the terms of use state that ‘your meetings will be recorded and reviewed and may be used in research publications in professional learning. Do NOT have confidential meetings on this research server!!!’, making this an unsuitable system for us to use.

We didn’t try Wimba, InstantPresenter, Media on Demand or WebEx as we felt that we’d found a good system for us.  We also didn’t try any VNC, IRC and VoIP combinations as we wanted a single system rather than trying to coordinate multiple tools with so much more potential for things to go wrong!

DimDim

The first one we tried was Dimdim.  This is open source, works on Window, Mac and Linux, and works directly in IE, Firefox and Safari (but sadly not Chrome) rather than requiring any installation.  It offers a range of presentation facilities, and ranges from free for up to 20 people, to $75 per month for 100 seat webinars.

We ran into a number of issues with our free trial tests.  The biggest issue was problems with audio and video, with audio cutting out if we had more than one video feed, and we had to find a workaround for getting Flash to recognise the onboard camera on Macs.  It offered the ability to record meetings, but recording can’t be paused and when new presenter takes over, the previous recording is stopped and overwritten.  There’s a neat widget for sending out invites (though again, it doesn’t work in Chrome), but the agenda didn’t seem to be carried through to the meeting room.  PollDaddy integration appealed to our resident widget lovers, but didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, and only the presenter was able to scroll embedded pages which caused problems reading them.  There were too many issues for us to be able to recommend it for trialing in a larger group.

Elluminate

Anyone who’s attended the JISC Online Conference or one of the many elearning webinars regularly on offer will have encountered Elluminate, so we were very optimistic that this would be a good option for us.  Again, we were using the free (vRoom) version, though there are various payment tiers available with vOffice for 20 users at $1536 a year and prices for larger group available on request.  Unfortunately one of our testers was completely unable to get into our vRoom on either Mac or PC, and others have had problems with permission settings and proxy settings giving some odd results in the past.  Despite our expectations and generally positive previous experiences, we felt that it didn’t meet our ‘works straight off’ requirement, and so kept looking.

Adobe Acrobat Connect

I’ve used Connect in its past incarnation as Macromedia Breeze and found it very easy to use and very good quality, so I was keen to see what my colleagues thought.  Our first attempt used the free ConnectNow Beta which is limited to three people, and we then bought a month trial for $62 to run a larger meeting with most of the CETIS staff; annual payments are also available for a lower overall cost.

We did have some initial problems with audio issues, but once everything settled down we were impressed with the quality of the sound and video, and the very pleasant interface.  It worked fine in Chrome, IE and Firefox, but the meeting couldn’t be launched in Safari and there were problems installing the required software in Linux, though it did run eventually.  The meeting administration interface for adding participants and scheduling meetings is far less elegant and intuitive than the actual meeting interface.  There are lots of nice little features, and the overall feeling from both our trial meetings was that this is a mature and stable system that is very pleasant to use.

There was however one major black mark against this system: very poor customer service when dealing with payments.  Buying one month’s access requires a credit card, which is then automatically debited each month until the arrangement is cancelled.  Unfortunately, actually cancelling this recurring payment is not an easy process, and Sharon spent several hours trying to do so online and following dead links on their website before finally learning that the only way to cancel these payments is by telephoning their customer services in the US.  Had we not had other meetings already arranged in Connect by the time we discovered this, this experience would almost certainly have made us continue our search for a suitable system.

Conclusions

We hold our monthly team calls in voice-only services such as Skype or PowWowNow, so we’re all very familiar with these types of virtual meetings.  I was surprised that quite a few of my colleagues felt less connected with the meeting when speaking because there wasn’t any feedback, but I think that’s something that people should be able to get used to fairly quickly.  On my part, I found being able to share slides and the ability to have mulitple webcam feeds really helped me to get much more from the session than I do from audio-only meetings, but that may depend on the individual participant.

A year’s subscription to the system we settled on costs less than it cost for me to travel to our most recent event, and far less than the cost of venue hire, catering, etc.  I’ll be using it for our next QTI WG meeting, and it’s definitely worth noting that this meeting would have been difficult to schedule without having an online option, and it would not have been possible to get everyone who can make the online meeting together for a face-to-face meeting.

General

IMS invite developers to participate in an IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) v2.1 implementation survey.

The survey is designed to do two things:

• establish the ‘state of play’ with regard to QTI v2.1 tool capabilities
• establish whether there is sufficient overlap in tool capabilities to define one or more profiles.

IMS will publish an anonymous summery of the survey outcomes to all participants.  Survey results will be strictly confidential and data from this research will be reported only in the aggregate.  Your information will be coded and will remain confidential, however if you wish you may supply your email address if you are willing to be contacted to follow up or for additional information.

The survey only poses questions about QTI v2.1 capabilities, which means that it is not relevant for developers of earlier versions of QTI.

The survey will only take around 20-30 minutes to complete.  Information about the QTI project group and results from this survey will be posted in the IMS QTI forum.

This is a great opportunity for QTI v2.1 developers to help steer the future of the specification.

Assessment, Standards and specifications, cetis-standards, standards

JISC and the Centre for Recording Achievement recently published the final report from the Study on the role of eportfolios in formative and summative assessment practices.  The report includes 34 case studies and offers a thorough examination of this form of assessment.

General

Charlie Balch at Arizona Western College has been working on a simple, web-based question system for networked computers and hand held devices.  AskClass.net currently functions as a poll tool, allowing the creation of multiple-choice, single-answer questions that can be used in a variety of educational settings and as a consensus building tool.  It’s still very much under development, so while it’s not possible at the moment to specify a correct answer, this and other functionality may emerge in the future depending on user feedback and viability.  A simple marking system would make this an extremely useful tool for both classroom and remote teaching support.

AskClass is written in ASP with a MS Access backend, although Balch is considering making future versions in PHP or Java with an XML backend to increase portability.  Other applications may be integrated with the tool over time.  This is intended as a learning aid, therefore security and multiple voting are not addressed in this version.

Contact details for requesting source code and suggesting features are available on the site’s FAQ.

Assessment, assessment (technology), elearning

You may remember a proposed standard for the transfer of qualification assessment data and evidence that was previously covered on this blog.

Work on this has been ongoing since then, and a draft standard is now available for public consultation and comment.  The public draft can be accessed via the BSI website, and comments may be submitted by following the instructions there.

All comments must be submitted by 30 November to be considered for the final version of the standard.  Depending on the nature and extent of comments received, the standard is likely to be released in the first quarter of 2010.

Assessment, Standards and specifications, e-Portfolio (Technology), portfolio

A Word in Your Ear 2009 - Audio Feedback is a one day conference on the use of audio for providing assessment feedback to university students being held at Sheffield Hallam University on Friday 18 December.  There has been some interesting work in this area in recently such as the JISC-funded Sounds Good project (Bob Rotheram who led that project is the keynote speaker at this event) and this event looks like an excellent opportunity to learn more about initiatives in this area.

Assessment, accessibility, innovation

There’s a lively discussion (beginning here) going on on the VLEs JISCMail discussion list around ‘innovative ways of online assessing’.  Although in some cases ‘innovative’ seems to be equated with ‘electronic’, there are some interesting activities and comments emerging:

• MS Word documents uploaded and marked by comments; Google Docs may provide greater preservation of comments.
• Ongoing submission process over the academic year managed by Moodle’s iterative assessment feature.
• ePortfolios - although Emma Duke-Williams observes that ‘mostly… they’re used as summative - and staff, rather than student, controlled repositories.’
• Awarding marks for posting in discussions on the VLE.
• Wiki contributions.
• Audio feedback.
• Video feedback.
• Peer assessment.
• Self-assessment.
• Need to think beyond just summative assessment to consider formative and diagnostic assessment.
• Ways of seeing whether learners are engaging with feedback provided and acting on it.
• Knowing one’s students.

Assessment

Congratulations to all the finalists and prize winners in this year’s JORUM learning resource competition, the results of which were announced at this year’s ALT-C Dinner last week.

The standard of entries was excellent, with the winner - LearnHigher’s Making Group-work Work - being an outstanding example of the innovative, engaging and effective resource the judges were seeking.  This extensive resource features a series of video ‘episodes’ following a group of five students as they work on a group project and covering many of the issues such activities involve such as personality clashes, reluctance to seek help from their tutor and what to do about the mysterious sixth group member who never turned up…  Each episode is supplemented with notes and activities that users can interact with as they choose, and the whole resource is appropriate, reusable and a great deal of fun.

Runner up, Introducing English as a Lingua Franca from the York St John University, and third place Delivering Student Workshops also from LearnHigher, are also well worth checking out. Congratulations to all!

educational-content, elearning

This blog is nothing if not topical, so I spent some time today looking at The Great Flu, a free, browser-based game designed to introduce players to the nature of viral epidemics and means of controlling them.

The game offers players the choice of five levels of flu severity (game difficulty), a €2 billion budget and a range of actions of varying effectiveness, such as sending researchers to afflicted areas, distribution of facemasks, stockpiling vaccines and antivirals, and closing schools, airports and public markets.  Taking various actions triggers various pieces of supporting material such as mocked-up news coverage and messages from governments or regional authorities.  The game also provides interesting information on the nature and spread of earlier flu pandemics.

Even at what is supposed to be the hardest level, the game is very fast to complete and very easy to ‘win’ (it took more effort to infect large parts of Europe for the screengrab above), but while it doesn’t offer much gaming challenge it is a very useful and quite fun resource for understanding the topic.

Via New Scientist.

serious games

Eric Shepherd of Questionmark has been developing an assessment maturity model ‘that provides a way for organisations’ executives and managers to monitor, chart and improve their use of assessments’, and has recently begun to formalise this in an online model.

The model separates the entire assessment process into three key areas (development, delivery and reporting), each comprised of six measures (stakeholder satisfaction, security, strategic alignment, maturity, data management and communication).  Shepherd also identifies four phases of assessment maturity which can help identify the needs and requirements of an organisations (ad hoc, managed, refined and aligned).  Each of these elements is or will be expanded and further developed as the model itself matures, with ongoing development being focused on the project wiki.

There is also a great deal of useful information available on the site, such as learning resources to help assessment managers understand their own processes’ maturity and helpful links to relevant material.

The model is still in development but should already be of value to users and will continue to develop over time.

Thanks to Steve Lay for the heads up!

Assessment