Metamedia

Moodle Audio Tools Update

I have updated my page on Moodle Audio Tools to reflect the current situation as of February 2009.

The situation today is much simpler than two or even one year ago, as Nanogong is the clear choice for doing this today.

Release 3 of Nanogong in August 2008 was a distinct improvement, especially integrating with Moodle.

The adoption of the Speex codec has improved the quality of the recording, which was one of its main weaknesses.  And its integration with the Moodle rich text editor means you can record and play back sounds in any rich text  box in a course, not just in the provided assignment module.

That's not to say there aren't some issues - with Gradebook integration of the assignment module, and occasional stability issues, but it has seen continual improvement over the last two years. So good job, Gong Project!

iTunes U Proves Better than Going to Class ?

From NewScientist comes news about a preliminary study comparing students listening to podcasts of a course lecture to students who attended the class for the live lecture.

"The students who downloaded the podcast alone averaged a C (71 out of 100) but those who attended class averaged a D. And those who listened to the podcast and took notes did even better - their average was 77."

The thing that I find interesting is how iTunes U and podcasting are assumed here to more or less synonymous. I'm sure Apple marketing is smiling with glee at that.

Pretty ironic when you stop to consider that the technology is just the basic simplicity of an RSS feed for some audio files.

Of course, Oxford got it right by having its lectures both ways.

More Musings:

• David Wiley at OpenContent
• Stephen Downes

Is YackPack Dead? Get Ready for a Surprise!

Yackpack, the well known and highly inventive group audio application, has been down for TWO WEEKS!

I first got a call from one of my foreign language faculty about it two weeks ago today. For nearly a week we received no response to our email inquiry. When we did finally get one, it said there were some "problems with servers" and that it would be up shortly. That was a week ago.

Clearly something has seriously gone wrong. Two weeks is an eternity in the fast-moving world of Web 2.0 applications.

And this is only the latest in a series of missteps that YackPack has made.

Last July, YackPack announced a pay model while the vast bulk of its educational customers were away for the summer vacation. When they came back to start the new school year, they were surprised.  As I blogged at the time, we were one of them.

Now, we are perfectly happy to pay for YackPack, because it is a great application designed by teachers for teachers, and there is nothing else quite like it. But we wish we would have had notice to prepare our budgets, and we wish could get a site license. But we jumped through some bureaucratic hoops and got our funding for it.

Suddenly in January however, we found we couldn't give our money away to YackPack?! They changed their mind about the pay model, and told us to hang onto our payments for a while. Okay by us, we said.

Then at the very end of February, YackPack went off line and has been down since.

Our foreign language teachers can't get their work done. We are resorting to the old fashioned method of recording files and uploading them one by one, and teachers responding by making new recordings, one by one - very inefficient. We are now scrambling to find an alternative for a product we have come to depend on for the last two years.

And if we find an alternative, we will be happy to give them our money instead.

YackPack is a product and company founded and run by educators - one reason the product is so great for education. They are obviously very smart and dedicated people.

But as a business it appears to be in very serious trouble.

Teaching Idea: Grading Papers with Audio Comments

Grading papers is one of the most time consuming tasks during teaching. Often, it would take a whole new paper to respond to the issues of the first paper. So we leave instead perfunctory comments.

Here's a better way: digitally record your comments as you read the paper, then send the audio file to the student by email or, if your LMS has the ability, by dropbox.

It takes no more time than a careful reading of the paper, you can make complex comments on any aspect of the paper, and the student will have a record of the comments they can use (hopefully) to write a revision or a next paper. And they will know you read the paper and responded to it.

There are several ways to do such recording:

• on your PC with a program such as Audacity
• with a handheld digital recorder, such as those made by Olympus. Get one that has USB connectivity to your PC. It will usually have its own software with which you can manage the files, including converting them.

The best format it use is to save the file as an MP3 format.

Moodle Audio Overview

This is an overview of what I know about the situation with audio support in Moodle which I compiled for a faculty member who is interested in having his Comp Sci students do a project with Moodle.

I should add that our main interest is in the use of audio for foreign language teaching, both conversation practice and homework assignments. Your interests may be different.

1) Moodlespeex

Moodlespeex is a simple java client, used for recording and playing. It hooks into both the Files area and Forums. It was first developed for Moodle 1.6 by an individual developer named Dan Stowell.

It is abandonware. It hasn't been developed since about August of 2006.

I got this to work in Moodle 1.6 on files, but not forums; but both worked in Moodle 1.7.  Other people have had the opposite experience. But both are clearly broken for everyone in Moodle 1.8. It does not use the standard block api, but was directly hooking into the Moodle forum code, so it is no surprise it does not upgrade well.

When it worked, it got good reviews from faculty, mainly because it is ultra simple and the quality of the speex format is very good for what foreign language teachers need.

Here is the Moodle plugin page: http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=418
Here is the main discussion forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50265

2) Covcell

Covcell is a 2 year project funded by the EU, sponsored at several universities. If you ever wanted to go to Iceland, the next Covcell conference is in Reykjavik this fall.

Covcell is actually a suite of applications mostly in Java that will run off the Red5 open source Flash server project (http://osflash.org/red5) also being done in Europe. 

It is still somewhere between alpha and early beta in progress. I tested the online demo site a couple of months ago and liked it, but I could never get the streaming server installation to work. For one thing, it was completely undocumented.

Also, Covcell has a rather different priority set (chat is first on the list) than our faculty who are mostly interested in conversation practice / recording homework.

Main site: http://covcell.org/
The main audio recording software: http://covcell.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83
Covcell Moodle discussion forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=5368

3) Gong

Gong is a fully mature Java server (Linux or Windows) based application out of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (http://www.ust.hk/en/index.html).

It can run as a standalone application or as a Moodle plugin. It is essentially a discussion forum application that is fully voice enabled. It has a very nice interface.

I tested this in Spring 2006 with a faculty member in Foreign Languages but she complained about the poor quality of the audio.

Back in June, I installed the new version, now up to version 5, but had the same issues with audio recording quality. 

They have switched to a speex format for their chat module, but the main boards still use wav. The main problem seems to be the codec is too good and picks up a lot of extraneous noise at the high end of the frequency range, which is not needed for voice applications.

The result is a sound quality that is tinny, thin, and background noisy.

So one of the issues with audio will be the acceptability of the sound quality to your customers: the foreign language faculty. Gong would be the clear winner if only the sound quality were better.

Gong plugs into Moodle in the cleanest way: it uses the official block api and is just that: its own block. As a result, it is usually not an issue when upgrading Moodle, which is very nice.

Main Gong site: http://gong.ust.hk/index.html
Main Gong Moodle forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50418

The Gong developers are very active in Moodle & very helpful.

4) DimDim

There is a piece of web conferencing software called DimDim which is being integrated with Moodle. I looked at it once last year, but it seems very different from what foreign language faculty are interested in at the moment, but it could be very useful down the road.

Main site http://www.dimdim.com/
Moodle Forum http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50760

5) MoodleVox proposal for Moodle 2.0

There is a proposal to bring something called VoiceXML to Moodle 2.0: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Voice

Moodle 1.9 is about to ship, and will be the last of the 1.x series. Moodle 2.0 will be a big leap and take much longer to ship (nearly a year) than the usual 3-4 month point release. 

See the development roadmap here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roadmap where the Voice project is listed as "Hopefully."

6) Other useful links:

The foreign language teaching forum: http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31

and especially see the Voice Application forum at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=1868

Development: Voice in Moodle

Development: Voice - MoodleDocs.

Re: my diatribe post on voice enabling an LMS, what I meant was something exactly like the VoiceXML project for the upcoming Moodle version 2. It proposes to put voice capability into Moodle wherever there is text input capability.

Let us hope it works out. It is exactly the sort of thing we need.

The Extended LMS: Still Deaf and Dumb

Here's a thought experiment about communication.

Imagine a world in which half the people can only speak and hear, and the other half can only read and write.

Imagine how difficult communication would be in such a world.

That's pretty much how it is with personal computers. Oh, things are a little better than on my first IBM PC in 1981; but not much. With some wrangling and crossed fingers, I can play sounds and little 6 inch square movies. Woo-hoo.

Let's face it, PC and Mac both still speak QWERTY as their native language.

And that is still pretty much how today's Learning Management Systems, even the new so-called Extended LMS with their batch of goodies that plug in, still are. They speak QWERTY as their native language; Unicode is their babblefish.

Considering how important the Foreign Language curriculum is to higher education, you would think at least that today's Learning Management Systems would have integrated audio and video. But they don't.

Oh, I can use audio and video blogs and then... then what ? Paste in embed code ? I don't call that "audio enabled."

What we want in an LMS is simply this:

• any place I can type, I can record audio
  
• any place I can read, I can play audio & video
• this is not just possible or doable, but EASY to do

And from a systems point of view, this means that audio and video in an LMS should be a CORE central component of the architecture, not some block or plugin or add on.

And until it is, the LMS will not serve the most basic needs of Foreign Language teachers. Or students, and at good colleges that means all students.

It will remain deaf and dumb.