Two free products that we use for screencasting in the E-Learning Unit are Jing (from Techsmith) and Screenr (from Articulate), and though they are very basic, they may be suitable for your needs.

Both Jing and Screenr have the capability to record a specified area of your screen for up to 5 minutes, and both allow you to add  audio using a microphone. You can upgrade both products to a Pro version – which opens up several additional features for each.

Jing:

I’ve been using Jing for a long time to do my screencasts, and what I like about it is that the tool sits discreetly at the top of my screen and allows me to start recording at any moment by just clicking a button. It also offers a very convenient way to capture still images (screenshots) – and provides drawing tools to annotate your images. Here is an example of an image captured with Jing:

To use Jing you need to download and install the software to your machine from the Jing website at http://www.techsmith.com/jing/

It only takes a few minutes, and you will be prompted to register. Registering gives you an account on screencast.com – which gives free online media storage (up to 2mb) and is also where your screencasts will be hosted.

To make a recording, you simply click on the Jing sun icon from the top of your screen and then select the area that you would like to capture. Click on either the ‘Capture image’ or ‘Capture video’ button. When capturing a video, you will receive a countdown before you begin. You can pause your recording or when finished just click the stop button.

Jing recordings are private by default – and only those who know the URL to your screencast will be able to view it. You can choose to password protect your screencasts, or make them publicly available. You can also embed the video onto your website.

Here is a sample embedded Jing recording:
 

 
Screenr:

I recently started using screenr and found it very useful to produce screencasts as well. One advantage of Screenr over Jing is that it is web-based and there is no need to download and install anything to your machine. You can log into the Screenr website with your Twitter, Facebook, Google or Yahoo account in order to publish your recordings.

Similar to Jing, you select the area of the screen you wish to record, and when finished, click the done button. You will then be able to publish the video and share it via various options. You can post the video directly to twitter or facebook, or you can embed it in your blog or website.

Here is a sample Screenr recording:
 

 
I’ve put together a summary comparison chart of Jing and Screenr to help you decide which tool is better for you.

Jing Advantages:

1. No need for internet connection to record or capture images
2. Record up to 5 minutes of audio and screen (video recording available with Pro version)
3. Produces Flash SWF files (Mp4 files available with Pro version)
4. 2GB free storage space on Screencast.com
5. Private by default, but can make recording password protected, or publicly available
6. Also capture screenshots and use tools provided for annotation
7. Embed screencast or screenshots onto webpage
8. Share on Twitter or Facebook (YouTube upload button available with Pro account)
9. Price: FREE; Pro US $14.95 per year

Screenr Advantages:

1. Web-Based; no need to install anything
2. Record up to 5 minutes of audio and screen
3. Produces MP4 files
4. No storage limits
5. Share instantly on Twitter or Facebook
6. Upload directly to YouTube
7. Download an Mp4 copy of file to computer
8. Easily get embed code to embed onto website
9. Price: FREE; Pro from US $19 per month

The online sessions available are:

1. Introduction to Blackboard
2. The Basics of Blackboard Assessments
3. Creating and Collecting Blackboard Assignments
4. Group Management in Blackboard
5. The Selective Release Tool

The purpose of these webinars is to give a general and succinct overview of a particular Blackboard tool and to allow viewers to observe from a convenient location – whether it be at one’s own desk, at home or anywhere with internet connection.

Upcoming BB Webinar:

The Basics of Blackboard Assessments will be held on Wednesday, 17^th November 2010, from 12Noon until 12:30pm.

Overview: In this 30-minute webinar, you can observe how to create a basic multiple choice assessment in Blackboard, and how to view submissions. You will receive other tips to get you started as well as instructions of where to get further help. If interested, please complete the form below.

Requirements: A basic understanding of Blackboard is recommended before participating in this session (for example, the difference between the Teach and Build tabs). You will need a computer with internet connection and speakers (or a headset).

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To register, please complete the form below.  If you are unable to view the form below, please go to this webpage.

I went on a hunt to find an inexpensive video editing software that could be used on my PC to edit my flip camera recordings and stumbled upon a rather impressive free online editor, Jaycut.

Jaycut requires no installation, as you do your edits directly on their website. It offers basic editing functions and the ability to post directly to a YouTube account. With no registration, and no video editing experience, I was able to upload my recording and remove unwanted parts, as well as add text, images and even some basic transitions.

It was very easy to use, and it took little time to get used to the interface. There are some pre-loaded images, videos and audio which can be used, but I uploaded some of my own. I simply dragged my uploaded media into a timeline (similar to other video editing software), made some minor changes, and then clicked the “Publish Mix” button. Without completing the free registration, my work was not saved in Jaycut, but I was able to send my editing work to my email address.

If you are looking for a free basic online editor, then give Jaycut a go, though I wouldn’t recommend it for more advanced features.

Photo Credit

Jonas Hombert at Wikimedia Commons

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Course Instructor, Designer, Teaching Assistant, Student, Auditor…you may be aware of the terminology but how much do you know about roles in Blackboard and what they mean? This article explains what the various roles are and provides you with enough information to allow you to ensure that the right people have the right level of access to your Blackboard course area.

After reading this article you should know:

• What different types of access to Blackboard course areas are and aren’t possible
• Which role(s) to use to enrol people onto your course area
• How to go about giving people access

A quick word about accounts and roles

Before starting, it may be worth pointing out that what is being discussed here are not Blackboard “accounts”. Having an account on Blackboard means that you have a username and password that allows you to log in to the system. You cannot access anything on Blackboard unless you log in. There is no notion of “guest” or “anonymous” access. Anyone who wants access Blackboard must have their own account. The vast majority of staff and students have Blackboard accounts set up automatically without any action required on their part. The process is linked to the creation of their central College Computing account . However, having an account does not mean that you will be able to see anything when you do log in to Blackboard. For this, you need to have been given access to course areas and this is where the notion of a role comes in.

Definition of a role

A role in Blackboard essentially defines the level of access that a person has to a course area and therefore defines what they can do in that course area. The following table provides a summary of the different role types.

For the Teaching and Building categories, the roles are linked to the tabs that you can see in a course area. It is important to note that there is no role in Blackboard which gives access to both the Build and the Teach tabs. If a person requires access to both then they will have to be enrolled as an Instructor or a Teaching Assistant and as a Designer. The Student View tab is available to both Instructors and Designers.

While you can mix the roles in the Teaching and Building categories, you cannot mix the roles in the Learning category, e.g. it is not possible to be enrolled as a Student and a Designer. This is considered to be a conflict in roles.

Also, a role in Blackboard does not necessarily link to a role in College. A first year student can be an Instructor on a course in Blackboard and a Professor can be enrolled as a Student. In reality, the former situation is rare, but Blackboard will not prevent a student being enrolled on a course with one of the teaching or design roles. Also, if you are a member of staff and find you have Student access to a course area, this does not mean that Blackboard has made a mistake about who you are. The Blackboard role is used to provide a particular level of access to a course area. You will most likely find that you are enrolled with a variety of different roles e.g. on some course areas as an Instructor, some as an Instructor and a Designer and still others as an Auditor.

The Teaching roles: Instructor and Teaching Assistant

The Instructor and Teaching Assistant roles both give access to the Teach tab in a Blackboard course area. This gives access to the Instructor Tools menu which by default appears under the Course Tools menu.

Instructor and Teaching Assistant level access also affect what you can do with the standard course tools in the Course Tools menu. For instance, an Instructor or Teaching Assistant can modify the settings on an existing Assignment but they cannot create a new Assignment. This isn’t necessarily very intuitive and indeed can be confusing. It might be best to remember the fact that if you are likely to need to create a new instance of something in your course area, you are most likely going to need Designer access.

So, what’s the difference between Instructor and Teaching Assistant access? By default they are pretty much identical apart from the fact that an Instructor has the ability to give other people access to the course area. This is done through the “Enrol Members” button which can be found in the Grade Book tool. Teaching Assistants do not have access to this functionality.

Instructors also have the ability to further restrict what Teaching Assistants can do in the course area by using the “Settings” item in the “Manage Course” tool in the Instructor Tools menu. Through this tool an Instructor can do things like deny the Teaching Assistant access to the Grade Book or prevent them from viewing student tracking data.

One final point to make about Instructor access, is that a person must be enrolled as an Instructor to be able to have their name appear on the course listing on the Blackboard homepage.

Not all Instructors are listed, only those who have been designated “Primary Instructors”. So, if someone’s name isn’t listed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t have Instructor access to the course area. They just aren’t identified as being a “Primary Instructor”

The Building role: Designer

The Designer role gives access to the Build tab in a course area. The most important feature that this provides access to is the ability to upload files to the course area and to delete existing files. The Build tab also gives access to buttons on your course pages which allow you to add items such as files, folders and links to tools.

The tools in the Course Tools menu, also look different on the Build tab than they do on the Teach tab, with a wider variety of features available to the Designer.

Designers do not have access to student data such as the Grade Book, assignment or assessment submissions. They do, however have access to discussion forum postings.

The Learning roles: Student and Auditor

People enrolled as Students or Auditors effectively have the same level of access to a Blackboard course area. They can view course materials, take quizzes, submit assignments, participate in discussion forums etc. So, if both roles effectively give the same level of access why would you use one of them rather than the other?

There are essentially two reasons for giving Auditor access instead of Student:

1. Resit students on automatically enrolled courses
2. To aid with course administration

Resit students

For course areas on Blackboard which are on automatic enrolment (that is, access to the course area is dependent upon the student’s registration details on the central student record system), students who are re-sitting the course will not be given access to the course on Blackboard by default. Access to course areas for these students is granted at the discretion of the course instructor and these students should be enrolled manually through the Grade Book as Auditors. If they are enrolled as a Student they will be automatically unenrolled the next evening when Blackboard refreshes its enrolment data. Anyone enrolled as an Auditor will be ignored by the automatic enrolment process.

Course administration

If someone wants to be able to see your course area e.g. a colleague wants to see how you do things or a postgraduate student wants to follow your course, you could enrol them manually onto your course area as Students. This would allow them to see the course materials without being able to make changes to the course area or to see student data. However, having people enrolled like this can make it difficult to distinguish between those people who are on your course because they are “real” students and those who are there for other reasons. So, instead of enrolling people as Students in this situation, you can enrol them as Auditors. Now you can easily identify who the Auditors on the course are. You can also use features like the Selective Release functionality to make course content visible only to those enrolled as Auditors or indeed to hide content from them.

The image above shows the Grade Book for a course area (click to see a larger image). The view has been sorted on the Role column and it is easy to distinguish between the different types of people enrolled.

Summary

So, when considering what level of access to give someone to your course area, the questions you need to ask are:

1. Do they need to be able to see student data such as grades, assignment and assessment submissions? – If so, they’ll need to be enrolled on the course as either an Instructor or a Teaching Assistant which gives them access to the Teach tab.
2. Do they need the power to be able to enrol other people on the course? – If so, they’ll need Instructor access
3. Do they need to be able to upload files to the course area? – If so, they’ll need to be enrolled on the course are as a Designer which gives them access to the Build tab (remember you can be an Instructor or a Teaching Assistant and a Designer)
4. Do they just need to be able to see the course materials? – Give them Auditor access

Once you know what level of access is required, if you are a course instructor yourself, you can enrol others as Teaching Assistants, Designers, Auditors or Students through the Grade Book tool in your course area. If you require someone to be enrolled with Instructor level access, you will have to request this through vle-support@qmul.ac.uk. We generally do not give access to course areas without the permission of one of the primary designers.

Further information

Further information is available on our online support site on http://www.learninginstitute.qmul.ac.uk/elearning/support/vle/

Photo Credit

aeioux on flickr

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a very quick and easy way to allow users to subscribe to your content. You will more than likely have see the RSS option on websites like the BBC or the Guardian. If a user has a means of reading an RSS feed (e.g. the personalised Google homepage or a RSS reader) they can use this link to suscribe. When they open their RSS aggregator, they will see the headlines of the newest items in all of those locations at once. They can then select what to view at a glance without entering and reading each site separately.

For example, when I log into Google, I receive the headlines for the most recent three articles in a dozen or so newspaper sites. Podcasts, for another example, also use RSS for subscriptions.

Here’s a video on YouTube from a company called CommonCraft that explains what RSS is:

You can get some free RSS readers from these places:

• http://www.google.com/reader/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feed_aggregators
• http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?qt=rss+reader&licenseType=49&tag=dir.li
• http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

You may be thinking about using a wiki to support your course, to share information with colleagues, or, for example, as a repository for service information of some kind.

Wikis can be very useful and powerful tools. But before jumping in, consider if they are the right technology for you.

You may find a wiki useful if:

• You have a large group of users
• You have an initiative which require a large number of people to each add good amounts of content to one place, and to edit each others’ content
• Your initiative runs over a good period of time
• There is a clear purpose to the object itself: What is the wiki for? How will people use it? How will it be integrated into the fabric of your course/service?

If you don’t have the above requirements, you may be better off thinking about using standard webspace, or the College’s Virtual Learning Environment.

An example where a wiki might be useful: you have a course of 150 students who are expected as part of their study to contribute ideas, reviews, original content of whatever kind.  Their peers are then expected to review, comment on and further edit that content, and the resulting resource will run over coming years as a resource for the course.

An example where a wiki would be less useful:  You have a large amount of course content and want to organise and deliver it online.  Communications and publications are one way: from you to your students.

Here’s some more information about using wikis in HE: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/social-software/wiki

If you want to start or play with a wiki:

There is no ‘homegrown’ wiki service at QM, so – after giving due consideration to the kind of data you’re going to have published in the wiki – you’re going to have to use an external one.

There are many out there free to use.  One which is favoured by some in HE is Wetpaint.  You can start your wiki up in under 5 minutes and it looks to be very easy to use.  Users can also publish video, pictures, participate in discussions etc.

If you would like to have a play, either set one up yourself, or have a play with the Wetpaint wiki we’ve set up in the Distance and E-Learning Unit at QM: http://deluwiki.wetpaint.com/. There’s very little content there as it’s for demo purposes, but it’s set up so that anyone can edit and publish new pages.  Have a go and leave a comment here (below this post) or there (on the wiki) to let us know how you find it.

I think Screencast comes into its own when combined with Jing. Being able to rapidly and easily record a video of what’s happening on your screen and upload it with one button to your Screencast account is very very useful. From there you just need to distribute the video which you can do by emailing the URL to whomever, linking to it from a website or embedding the HTML, which is generated by Screencast, into a webpage or VLE course area.

However, Screencast is not just limited to Jing. You can upload other media files into it which presents, at least a temporary and low-level but immediate, solution to the problem of storage. Where to put files is the big problem that our staff encounter with online video. We usually suggest YouTube but some staff have issues with the public availability; which is reasonable. Screencast movies are, by the very nature of their being available to share, technically public but do not have the massive search engine of Google indexing their location.

Screencast also provides a few other functions:

• Customized Templates
• Desktop Uploader
• RSS Feeds so your users can subscribe to your media
• MediaRoll widget for blogs

So what does it do? It’s a free application that works as an excellent screen recorder; either video or a still image. It sits in a very tidy manner at the very top of your screen like so:

When you click on the unobtrusive circle you given the option to Capture or look at your History. The History option will bring up your Library; Jing will record every capture you’ve made and its current location. The second point there, location, is important… and we’ll get back to that in a bit.

The capture software gives you the option of a still image or video. The video is a fairly basic recorder but often-times that’s all you need. It will produce something like what you can link to below (note that all the images and videos in this post are recorded using Jing and hosted by Screencast… WordPress unfortunately will not accept embedded video from Jing so just click to follow the link instead). What I’ve recorded is a brief run-through of the annotation tools available for a still image. In this example, let’s say I’m giving an introduction to the tools in Photoshop. Audio can be included but I’ve decided not to.

Click here to see an example of Jing video on the screencast website

Lastly, I mentioned how important the location was to note. This is, in my opinion, where Jing excels. The biggest issue we find people have with online video is not how to record but where it goes. Jing will allow you to save any capture locally (the swf video comes with a player built into the file) but it will also upload any files to Techsmiths free hosting service called Screencast. You can also use it to FTP to any site or to upload to Flickr or YouTube. All very very useful. The free hosting service has a limit of 2GB of space and 2GB bandwith p/m usage but that’s more than enough for you to start making a library of short rough-and-ready content for your learners.

Lastly it also publishes a paragraph of HTML so you easily embed content into another location, for example your VLE course area.

It’s one of those fantastic apps that spreads so quickly among users. I think this is due to two things: it’s extremely easy to use and it has a very limited application. It just does what it does without too many bells and whistles. All too often we’ve seen nice clean simple apps which have become over-burdened and confused by feature-creep (Quark Express suffered greatly from this in my opinion).

It only takes a few clicks to set up an account and give Doodle times for your meetings. It then emails you with an admin link (to allow you to make further changes) and an invite link (to email around to whomever you wish). An example of what an invitee see is included below:

They just click the times they can make and press save. The product becomes all the more efficient because, as those giving their availability later come in, they can see the most likely dates for the meeting according to the availability of other invitees. So they often change their own schedule accordingly.

How does all this help? Well, if you’ve ever tried to bring a dozen or so people into one room for the same period of time you’ll understand just how many emails and phone calls are involved. Doodle provides a very simple answer; let them do it themselves.

You can find the tool here: http://www.doodle.com/

I wonder if an Echo360 installation installed on a tablet PC with a decent microphone with a wireless link to the room’s projector (all easily installed and setup) is a rather nice way to handle lecture capture in a department?