bringing virtual campus to life with content development

www.demmltd.co.uk

Bringing Virtual Campus to l i fe with Content

Development

www.demmltd.co.uk

www.demmltd.co.uk

About Me

• DEMM Ltd – Contracting for NIACE & working with the SFA and OLASS Providers (Manchester College, A4E, Milton Keynes College, Weston College)

• OLASS Project Manager Kensington & Chelsea College

• CPD Manager East Surrey College• E-Learning Manager (Merton & South Thames

College)• IT Lecturer (Merton College)

• Danny O’Connor

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Why I am here..

• I am here to demonstrate how the Virtual Campus is being brought to life through content development– Through sounds– Through Images– Through Interactivity

• The tools we need to use to accomplish this

• The training taking place

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Background

• Virtual Campus in UK Prisons– Empty we needed content…

• Content Submitted by OLASS Lecturers– Static– No previous exposure to e-learning

• Little or no access• Lack of knowledge• Lack of Skills

• Content submitted by Lecturers outside of OLASS– No understanding of security issues– Virtual Campus constraints

• External Sources– Costs…

• Had to find a way of creating interactive resources ourselves

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Solution

• Rapid CATs (Content Authoring Tools)

• To be used by lecturers working within OLASS to produce materials that can be placed onto the Virtual Campus

• To be used by inmates to generate interactive materials for teaching staff

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Examples of what it can do…

Asset Skills Housing – Learning module created from LMI Bitesize static learning materials converted using Courselab

International Women’s Day – Created from tutors handout submitted through SCDB process from Kensington & Chelsea College

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Examples of what it can do…

Personal Hygiene – From the same project as above. But the lecturer wrote the materials, was taught how to use Courselab and developed the materials herself

Recycling Words at work – Part of an ESF/SFA Project where lecturers from HMP Bullwood Hall wrote the materials and it was developed using Courselab.

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Examples of what it can do…

Visiting the Woman’s Health Clinic – The materials were supplied by the lecturer at HMP Holloway and were converted using Courselab

VAK Assessment Tool – Original idea taken from the Business Balls website but re-written and turned into an interactive Visual, Audio, Kinesthetic Assessment tool by DEMM Ltd and donated to Virtual Campus

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Impressive huh?

• However, a CAT assumes you understand and know how to do lots of other things such as…– Work with and understand images– Work with and understand sound– Work with and understand video/movies

• Because a CAT just pulls all these things together, then adds interactivity…

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Images and VC

• Images must be of the type that can be displayed over the internet i.e. .gif, .jpg, .png

• No single file on VC can be over 10mb

• Bandwidth is at a premium this relates to images

• Images may need to be optimised… What???

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Spot the difference?

97 kb 22 kb

200 pixels

299

pix

els

200 pixels

299

pix

els

Image A Image B

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Confused?

• In the Christmas Tree example Image A and Image B are exactly the same viewing size. But have a different file size!

200 pixels

299

pix

els

Image A = 97kbImage B = 22kb

Image A is over four times the file size!

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What is it?

• Graphic optimisation is the process of producing smaller graphics files

Q. What do we mean by smaller graphics files?

A. We really mean the file size… e.g. 10kb not 60x60 pixels - although sometimes we do!

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Resolution

• Images are made up of pixels (or dots). The more pixels you have per/cm, inch combined with the number of colours available, the larger the image will be but also the clearer it will be.

Bad Better Best

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Why is it important?

• VC Bandwidth - Can be as little as 1mb and that is shared – at home you may have 8-14mb!

• 10 christmas trees = approx 7 secs to view

• The challenge becomes maintaining a high quality graphic while keeping a lean file size; the balance of these two elements is key to optimising your web images.

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RIOT

• Luckily there is a free tool available to help….

• Unfortunately the name is not a good one for using in Prisons

• RIOT stands for Radical Image Optimisation Tool

• Example of how it works….

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Sounds

• Being able to create and manipulate sound is important for several reasons and is not only Virtual Campus Specific.– In VC there are restrictions on the size of files that

can be uploaded (10MB) this sounds a lot but is not really.

– For example if you have created an interactive resource in Courselab with graphics and interactions adding a large sound file could easily push the file size above 10mb and would not get uploaded into VC

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It’s useful & fun..

• You can embed sound into other packages e.g. powerpoint

• Any file that needs to be served over the web needs to be as small as possible because of download speeds

• You will have the ability to improve accessibility e.g. to the visually impaired by adding a sound file/description to text or images

• You will gain skills that could help you with other technology – creating podcasts/audio blogs for example

• With ever expanding use of e-learning you can create lectures to students to listen to even on their phones and mobile devices

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Audacity

• There is a free tool for creating, editing and optimising sounds called audacity

• Example of how it works…

• Create sound

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Video Optimisation

• Video optimisation is one of the most difficult things to do as it can be quite technical and involves numerous players, plugins, codecs and containers

• However there is a tool that can simplify the process and it quite simple to use however you do need to have a deeper understanding to get the full benefits.

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FVD Converter

• There are two main things that we can tweak to minimise video file sizes

• The Audio settings• The Video settings

• By tweaking either one or both of these can dramatically increase or decrease file size but also the quality in terms of what you hear and what you see

• FVD Converter is a free tool with a simple user interface that will enable you to do this

• Example….

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Putting it all together

• Back to the CAT

• Courselab 2.4 is a free tool that will enable you to put all these elements together sound, images and video and then add interaction to the mix to create interactive content.

• Example…

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Other Tools

• There are other professional (Paid for) Content Authoring Tools available in-fact as of November 2011 there were over 120 different tools available.– Courselab 2.7– Captivate– Articulate

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Articulate Examples

• Here are some examples of work created with Articulate

Two of them can already be found on VC

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More information

Danny O’Connor DEMM Ltd

www.demmltd.co.uk

Free Courselab Training Videos to get you startedwww.youtube.com/DEMMLtd

danny.oconnor@demmltd.co.uk07779577779