UBC Arts ISIT Blog

I attended a screencast seminar hosted by Land & Food Systems today. It was their first seminar of their "Brown Bag Lunches" series. Love the name by the way... =)

Exactly, what is screencast? The definition I got was
"Capturing what happens on your screen while simultaneously recording your voice and/or additional video can use screencast software to edit to enhance ouput and email it or post it on the web."

The type of software they use for screencasting is Camtasia. The generalization I got from the presenter was that he tried out a few products such as Wink and Captivate but found Camtasia to be easier to use as well it had the functionalities he needed to produce his flash/video output. The presenter also mentioned in Powerpoint you are able to use Camtasia. By a simple click of a button, you can easily narrate your powerpoint presentation. I'm not sure if Captivate has that feature but I'll be looking into it sometime just to campare their features =)

With the help of UBC's Land and Food Systems, we've finally upgraded to the latest instance of Sakai 2.2. Here's a screenshot of what the new look and feel is.

I have to admit the design is much cleaner. I like the use of the white space. In the old design, the grey background picture made it look cluttered. The default blue and yellow looks great even though I know you can customize your own template. The previous version also had boxes for the worksite information, announcements, discussion, and chat. Again, Sakai 2.2 no longer uses the boxes and therefore, with the use of the white space, the user interface is improved so that it is much more easier on the eye.

Working on applications that bridge UBC IT infrastructure: SIS, CWL, UBC Directory, my.CV and HR is quite a challenge. The challenge is to identify an employee across all of the infrastructure components given that there is no shared key. HR, my.CV and CWL all use employee number so it is possible to reference an employee in any one of these systems for a given employee number, but unfortunately UBC Directory and SIS do not use this key. Therefore extracting data from UBC Directory cannot be accomplished entirely by automation for employees where an exact first name, last name match is not made across systems. However, when an exact first name, last name match is not possible, using the best match of first and last name as well as departments and titles achieves highly accurate results so it works out to be just a trickle of accounts that require manual verification. For these accounts, once the ldap uid from UBC Directory is matched up with a given employee number, subsequent updates will proceed without a glitch. This is a bit of a nuisance syncing up the employee records, however, integrating UBC Directory in our application reduces our workload because: UBC Directory is UBC wide (therefore most widely used and updated), it is already populated with data, and it is maintained by someone else.

I have been doing some research on video conferencing, particularly web conferencing. It seems that the easiest and most economical tool is ichat AV (version 3). I have not used ichat myself but from what I have read, if users have a webcam such as an isight camera and high bandwidth they should be able to see and hear the other person very well. Futhermore, there can be up to 4 people in the ichat video conference. The program is free and apparently very simple to use. The downside is that it's for macs only and the all members of the conversation need to use ichat. Finally, I have heard that the video and audio have a bit of a time lag...a few seconds so it's not exactly real time. Has anyone experienced this and knows if it can be fixed?

I have also looked at Sightspeed which is similar to ichat except it is for PC (but also compatible with macs apparently). Sightspeed has a free and pro version. If you have the free version you can only initiate 1-1 video chats. The pro version alows you to initiate multiple user video chats (max is 4 users). However, you don't need the pro version to join a multiple user chat conversation. The down side is that there is an annual or monthly fee for the pro version. The fee isn't much ($50 US and $5 US respectively). However, there is always the chance the software won't be offered the following year.

Has anyone used either of these programs for a professional video conversation (i.e. for a research interview or panel discussion)? Or are there other similar programs available that are better?

At our institution, we use a separate tool called CTConnect that allows us to connect to the Student Services Centre to populate, add, delete, modify courses. Last Thursday and Friday, we along with other larger faculties such as Medicine, Applied Science, and Distance Education met with IT Services to discuss the learning context hierarchy. The point of the meet was to see if the admin interface in CE6 would have the features that CTConnect currently does for us. Unfortunately, the WebCT consultant said it wouldn't allow us to do cross-listing to add, populate, drop multiple sections. Some features were possible but that would mean that it would be done through the API and that wouldn't be an option since most of the WebCT support for UBC wouldn't have the knowledge to do it through the API.

Next week we'll also have a series of meetings with ITServices. ITServices will need to rebuild/enhance CTConnect so that it'll be compliant with CE6. The agenda will be with regards to more discussion on the SIS Integration Design and all the associated processes and requirements at a higher level.

My question is if other Universities/Colleges went through any challenges such as ours. It would be fabulous if anyone can share their experiences and what obstacles were faced.

I have started to use Typo3, a web-based content management system, to create some simple webpages. I was surprised to see how easy it was to use Typo3. As someone with limited webpage design skills, I was glad to see the variety of templates Typo 3 offers and the ability to easily customize your webpage. Here is a quick run down on the features of Typo 3 that I particularly like:

-a constant left hand menu panel is visible on all pages
-when you create new pages you can choose where in the menu they should appear
-you can select any desired number of template content elements for a single page. For example, on a single page, I am able to choose to have a multimedia element (i.e. a flash movie), a text object with a built in image holder, a list file links, a search form, and a mail form.
-you can embed your own html that you have constructed in Dreamweaver or elsewhere. By selecting the 'plain html' element, I can paste in the html code that Dreamweaver constructed.
-you can select to have pages visible to all viewers or hidden. I particularly like this function because I can easily select 'hide', and my incompleted page will not be visible on the webpage

Of course, Typo3 has many other features and I have yet to explore all of them. But, from my short venture into Typo3, I am quite impressed with it.

UBC will be migrating from WebCT 4.1 to WebCT CE 6. We, along with other faculties, will be meeting in the next couple of days to discuss about the learning contect hierarchy. I'm sure different faculties have their own issues which is the purpose of this meeting to ensure this process of migrating runs as smoothly as possible. Below are some of the issues Arts has

1. Roles

a.Student staff access level

Can our student staff be assigned a role that will allow them to access/populate/create/deleted courses yet also restrict them from accessing courses they are enrolled in? If so, can I set these restrictions?

b. Departmental administrating role

In departmental administrator's interface, they can see over 300 of 800 Arts courses that should not be visible in their interface. They should only have access at departmental levels.

c. Instructor Role: Course Ownership

We currently have 34 instructors that have course ownership which allows them to populate and create their own courses. Will these instructors have a separate role to administer their own courses?

2. Importing Courses

a. Selective/conditional release on quizzes.

Will instructors have to reassign their conditional releases (ie. Quizzes, assignments)?

b. Double-byte characters

With Vista, our pilot course was originally created in WebCT 3.x (ISO) then migrated to 4.1 (UTF-8). HTML files turned out, however, the content of the quizzes did not. The workaround on Arts IS’s end was to convert the character set from ISO to JAPN and use an external program to convert from JAPN to UTF-8 then from UTF-8 into Vista. Is this fixed with CE 6?

3. Restore Courses from backup files

Some instructors have many course backups from previous years and often times wants them restored. They attempt to do this, however, since the course size is very large, the process of restoring doesn’t complete. We need to contact ITServices to have them restore it for the instructors. I was informed by ITServices that they can do this at their backend interface. After the move to CE6, there will be many course backups from previous years. Will we be able to do this? Will be run into any problems with regards to large file sizes?

*Please feel free to leave any comments and share your experiences with your institution's migration.*