One last try with emailing results

Today I handed over all of the files for this project to Matt, but before doing so I made a couple of corrections (that Roxanne had pointed out) and tried to get the email results function to work one last time.

I added the email capability to the Boolean module by going to Quiz Preferences and inserting a slide that displays the results, then posted this version of the module on my iSchool webspace. After I'd answered the questions and clicked "Submit" on the results slide, my preferred email application (gmail) opened up and I was able to send a message. The email arrived OK, but had nothing in the body or as an attachment.

So I went back to Quiz Preferences > Reporting. I had initially selected the options to send as an attachment and send quiz results only, so I switched to have it send quiz results and slide views... and still got an email with nothing in it.

My next try was to change the options to send in the body of the email (and quiz results and slide views). This time I got a message from google saying, "Request: URI Too Large. The requested URL/mail/... is too large to process."

My final test - sending the only the quiz results in the body of the email. And again I got the "too large" message.

In the mean time, I had tried running through the module on the PC in TIS (using IE instead of Firefox) and would get the following message, "This form is being submitted using e-mail. Submitting this form will reveal your e-mail address to the recipient, and will send the form data without encrypting it for privacy. You may continue or cancel this submission." When I clicked OK, nothing happened, so it seems that it wasn't able to connect with any email application.

So, all in all, I had no luck in trying to get the email reporting to work.

Final week! (and problems with reporting)

I spent most of Monday adding closed captions to each module. This was relatively straightforward, since the script was already typed up, but somewhat time-consuming because I wanted to synchronize the audio and closed captions at the sentence level. The default size for the closed captions was two small and allowed for too many lines, so I changed them to two lines of 12-point font.

Thus far, I hadn't gotten any question responses emailed to me (although I had run through them several times), but I assumed this was because I was running the modules from my desktop and they weren't yet on a web server. On Monday night, therefore, I put some of the modules up on my iSchool webspace. I answered the questions again, but still received no emails. On Tuesday, I looked around on Captivate's support site, and found out that I needed to include a review slide at the end of the quiz (which has a "Send Email" button on it), in order to actually send the email. When I added the review slide, previewed the module, and clicked "Send Email" I did get a message from the web browser telling me that the application was trying to communicate with my email, but nothing happened when I clicked "OK." Reading more extensively in Captivate support, I found many references to the fact that the email results function simply does not work, either in Captivate 3 or Captivate 4. I will do a little more testing on Friday, but am not hopeful about its results. Given the fact that Matt had already told me that he'd had trouble using SCORM to report out through Blackboard, I have no immediate solution as to how to report the students' responses from these modules to Roxanne. This is something I should have been testing earlier in the implementation process.

Since I was at something of a standstill on quiz reporting, I took the rest of Tuesday to make some final changes to the modules, in preparation for the capstone poster session on Wednesday. Quite a while before I actually ended up recording the audio, I had printed the script for each module on a separate page. Throughout the editing process it was helpful to make note of changes to be made to each module on their script page, so that I had one location to check when making changes. Here were the final changes I made on Tuesday:

• Scholary vs Popular Articles: Correcting the response to one of the questions and making sure that the final chart appeared immediately on its slide.


• Research vs. Review Articles: Adding slides that highlighted different areas of the diagram as they were discussed and re-doing the audio and closed captioning to match this. Correcting the timing of elements on one of the question slides.


• Keywords & Controlled Vocabulary: Re-recording the "keyword vs. subject" search. (The previous recording had been a little too short to fit the audio, so I'd extended one of the frames. When I did this, however, there was a flash at the beginning and end of the extended frame. I assumed this was because the original recording was zoomed in, but when I added the exact same level of zoom in the exact same position to the extended frame, the flashing still occurred.)


• Boolean operators & Search Stragies: Making sure the slide with Venn diagrams didn't fade in. Adding slides that highlighted each Boolean operator as it was discussed and re-doing the audio and closed captions to match this. Adding slides during the portion on creating a search strategy based on a particular article of interest to highlight AND and OR when they were mentioned.

And here is the result: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~hnorton/capstone/intro.htm

Adding audio, etc.

Here's what happened at the end of last week:

Thursday, I met with Roxanne and showed her the slides with questions on them that weren't "question slides" (meaning their results can't be reported) in the Research vs. Review Articles module. Roxanne confirmed that being able to have students' answers reported to her is important, so we decided that in this module and the Scholarly vs. Popular Articles module, each question would have 2 slides: one instructing the student to follow a link to the article's database record (allowing the link to open in a new window and not disrupting the module), and the second would have the citation and the question on it. We decided that the final slide of each module should include CC licensing information, but not Roxanne's contact information. We also decided that students should not have the opportunity to go back on question slides- even when they are allowed to go back, they cannot change their answers, so there is little benefit to their being able to do so and plenty of opportunity for confusion. Other details that we noticed needed changing upon looking at the modules included:

• PubMed: When you click on the link to PubMed, the module continues running. Putting in a "Continue" button for students to push when they return to the module will fix this.
• Boolean: There is some flashing in the middle of the Camtasia portion that should be fixed. Instead of trying to link to the database AFSA in every question, put a slide before the questions (with a link) saying that they may wish to refer to ASFA's thesaurus for controlled vocabulary.
  

After meeting with Roxanne, I spent the rest of the day finishing the Keywords & Controlled Vocabulary module (which, you may recall, had to be re-done because of a corrupted Camtasia file) and making changes to other modules we had discussed. To be sure students' answers to questions would be sent to Roxanne, I went to the Quiz Preferences in each module, enabled reporting, and chose email as the method of reporting, putting my email address in for testing purposes.

On Friday, I met with Loriene and showed her the modules. She pointed out that I should consider accessibility issues (having closed captions on the audio will go part way towards satisfying those concerns). She also suggested that we submit the tutorial to PRIMO, ACRL's database of peer-reviewed instructional materials online.

For the rest of the day, I fixed the questions in the Scholarly vs Popular Articles and Research vs Review Articles modules, and added audio to all modules. Per Matt's suggestion, I added the audio in Captivate. This worked well, for the most part, because Captivate creates a preview that runs while you're recording the audio to ensure that the two are synchronized. Unfortunately, this preview does not include playing the imported Flash from Camtasia, so I had to open these videos in another screen and play them while recording the audio.

Links in question slides

I was able to make the changes Roxanne and I discussed yesterday without any problems with one exception - I have not yet fixed the links on question slides in the scholarly vs. popular and research vs. review modules. Just to remind you, I couldn't put links directly into question slides (Captivate doesn't let you), so these links were actually published animations from separate Captivate files. Basically, for each link, I have a separate small Captivate file that just consists of one slide with one small, transparent button on it - when you click the button it takes you to the appropriate URL. So I went back to each of these files and changed them so that when you click on the button it takes you to the appropriate URL in a new window. The first time I made the change, I previewed the project to confirm that it did open up the link in a new window. I published each project after I made the change (I had already deleted the previous published version so that I wouldn't be confused by having 2 different versions in my files.) So then I went back to each question slide with a link, deleted the existing animation that served as a link and imported the new published file as an animation. When I then previewed the whole project, these links still came up in the same browser window! I talked to Matt about this and he said that the browser settings wouldn't have been imported with the animation. His suggestion about how to work around this problem was to create slides that look like question slides but aren't (we wouldn't be able to have the responses to these questions sent to Roxanne in any way) - I'll give this a try tomorrow.

In the meantime, as I was putting the other modules together, I went back to each Camtasia recording and read through the script while watching it, cutting short segments and adding frames as necessary. I also moved the powerpoint slides directly to Captivate so that only the full-motion screen-capture portions are still in Camtasia. This means that it will be easier to edit the timing for each slide (making it longer or shorter) from within Captivate instead of having to edit it in Camtasia, publish it, and reimport it into Captivate any time there needs to be a change. I think it also improved the clarity of these slides.

Combining elements from Camtasia and Captivate

On Monday and Tuesday I worked on combining the video elements of each module created in Camtasia with the exercises created in Captivate. On Friday I had tried publishing the Camtasia elements as flash videos (FLV files) and importing them into Captivate slides, but as far as I could tell, it wasn't working (only a gray box showed up in on the slide, and nothing happened when I previewed the project). Once I talked to Matt, though, I found out that this was the correct method, and my problem was simply the fact that the video only shows when you preview the project in a website. Some other problems/issues that came up as I was putting the modules together were:

• Links - the default is that they open in the same browser window as your project, so you have to use the back button to return to the tutorial (which then starts from the beginning). When you create an action that links to an outside website, you can specify that you want it to open in a new browser window - I've been going back and changing the links to be sure that they do so.
• Flash skins - when you import a flash video into Captivate, the default settings create a skin with separate pause/play/volume buttons for the video and pause the Captivate presentation while it is played. Having two sets of control buttons is certainly not visually appealing. It can also be confusing because there are forward and back buttons in the Captivate viewer which only move forward and back through the Captivate slides and don't work if you try to fast forward or rewind while you're watching imported flash video. As a solution to this problem, I've started using the following procedure: make the Captivate slide as long as the imported video, have no skin on the video, and don't pause the Captivate slide while the video is playing. Then there is only one set of controls and they work for the whole project.
• Timing - There's still a lot to do with regards to getting the timing of everything right. I did some edits to the "answers" in the scholarly vs. popular and research vs. review modules. The default slide length is 3s - I read the content of these slides aloud to determine how long they would take to read and adjusted the length accordingly (to around 10-15s).
  

I was able to create combined videos for 5 of the 6 modules (the Camtasia portion of keywords & controlled vocabularies was corrupted in some way and will have to be redone) and show them to Roxanne on Tuesday. Here are the changes I'll be making based on that meeting:

• Overall:
  
• Add a slide at the end of each module that says "the end" or something like it
  
• We decided that we didn't need to have much library branding throughout the tutorial since it will be found on the library website. I'll take the intro slide used in the Catalog vs. databases module and use it in the other modules.
  
• Scholarly vs. Popular:
  
• Fix the links so that they open in a new window
• In the "answer" for the article from Nature, take out the comment about Nature being one of the most well-known journals.
• In one question slide, italicize Economist.
• In the "answer" with graphs - take a new screen shot of only one graph and make the caption larger.
• Roxanne will send the correct citation format for the wikipedia article "Colony collapse disorder" and I'll put it on the question slide.
• Research vs. Review:
• Fix the links so that they open in a new window
• On all of the question slides change the text that says "(Click here for abstract.)" to "View this link, then answer the question below." This is to clarify that they have to view the database record with the abstract in order to answer the question.
• Boolean operators and search strategies
• Look into improving the video quality
• In the drag-and-drop exercise bold or highlight the connector and change the text for AND and NOT: "Please move only those animals that lay eggs AND fly."
• Change the length of the "answer" slides to around 10s each
• Catalog vs. databases
• The link to another tutorial does open in another window, but should also pause the tutorial.
• Italicize the title in question 5
• Take out the "Question _ of _" text on each question slide
• PubMed
• The link to PubMed does open in another window, but should also pause the tutorial.
• Use the mouse to hit "search" instead of using the keyboard to enter in the MeSH search
• Solve problem in going between Camtasia and Captivate portions of this module

I'll be making these changes and sharing the updated modules with Roxanne in webspace by this evening. Then I'll be working on adding audio to the modules.

Work done Friday and questions for next week

On Friday, I did a variety of different things:

• I finished making the edits that Roxanne suggested in our Thursday meeting and created a new video for the catalog vs. database module.
  

• I tried to import flash files produced from Camtasia into Captivate, to no avail. When you produce your project in Camtasia, one of the options is to create a flash file (the default is a SWF file, but FLV is also possible). You can then insert flash into Captivate slides (FLV). Even so, I couldn't get my Camtasia videos to work within Captivate. This is something I'll be asking Matt about on Monday.

• I created interactive slides for the keywords and controlled vocabulary module. This is where students are asked to create a hierarchy, given a list of terms. I still have to decide exactly which way to present each question:
• Format #1 - as fill-in-the-blank question slides
• Here, the input is handled in the same manner as it is for all other question slides.
• Visually, it's not as appealing because you can't completely hide the fill-in-the-blank phrase (it appears as a miscellaneous "<" on the screen), and you can only have up to 8 blanks
• Format #2 - as a blank slide with each text-entry box inserted separately
• This creates a submit button for each box (which you can hide) - I'm not sure if the reporting is equivalent to that for question slides. This is something to ask Matt about.
• It's more visually appealing and you can add as many text boxes as fit on the screen.

So the main things I need to do next week are add audio and integrate Camtasia and Captivate portions for each module.

Camtasia versions

Thursday was a day for dealing with more technical difficulties. In trying to show Roxanne one of my Camtasia files earlier in the week, I got an error message saying that I couldn't open the file because it was created in a newer version of Camtasia. In other words, files that I created at the iSchool's IT lab (using Camtasia 6.0.1) wouldn't open at TIS (where they have Camtasia 5.0) - this was true for 4 out the 6 modules. I assumed that I would be able to go back to the IT lab and save these files in an older version, but there is not separate file type to distinguish between versions. It's vital that I be able to work with Camtasia files outside of the IT lab because as of Friday the lab is closed until August 18th. I asked folks at the IT lab and searched on Tech Smith's (the company that makes Camtasia) website and other help pages and couldn't find any information on how to enable this kind of backwards compatibility between software versions. I thought about downloading a trial version of Camtasia (which is fully functional and lasts for 30 days) onto my laptop, but it is only available for Windows and I have a Mac. I thought about buying Windows at the campus computer store (where it's cheap) and downloading a Windows emulator so that I could run it on my Mac. Before doing so, I stopped back by TIS to check the error message one last time. I did a search for the exact text of the error message, and finally found a solution! (In case you're curious, here's where I found it: http://forums.techsmith.com/archive/index.php/t-3476.html) That worked for 2 of my 4 modules that were made in Camtasia 6. Throughout my search process I also realized that the actual screen-recordings were one file type (.camrec) that was usable across versions, while the projects where I combined and edited these recordings were a different file type (.camproj). The camproj files were the ones that I couldn't open in Camtasia 5.0, but it proved not too difficult to re-import the camrec files and redo some editing.

So, basically, I got it all worked out in the end. This problem with backwards compatibility of Camtasia versions is something that folks should certainly take into consideration when they're thinking about buying the program, though.

Struggles with Flash

On Wednesday I gave Flash a try in order to create a diagram into which students could drag and drop items to demonstrate how Boolean operators work. Since I didn't have any previous experience with Flash, this was somewhat challenging. I was using Adobe Flash Professional, which has a largely graphic interface. Various instructions I found through software help sites involved entering some simple code, but I had a hard time figuring out where I could enter such code (as it turned out, this involved editing "actions" associated with a movie clip or button). Once I got that figured out, I kept creating files where you could move the whole graphic around, but not specific elements (the samples I found converted graphics to movie clips and then created a button within each movie clip - but I couldn't figure out to make a button within a movie clip). Basically, I struggled for a long time with understanding how to use the software and looking through help manuals, but eventually I got it to work!

Implementation, Part 3

A little more background...
Roxanne will be drafting the audio script for the modules, so my next step was to draft the video segments to give her an idea of how long they would be and allow her the opportunity to suggest changes. To do so, I took the powerpoint slides Roxanne had made (2-5 slides of content for each module), added some slides, and took screen-recordings of demonstration elements in the library catalog and various databases. I edited these screen-recordings in Camtasia, making use of its zoom-and-pan and call-out capabilities. Each module is meant to be ten minutes at the most, and at least half of that time is devoted to the active learning exercises. Consequently, the screen-recordings are relatively short - typically between 2 and 4 minutes. As an example, here's my draft of the scholarly vs. popular articles module:

Notes from today's meeting with Roxanne

We took a look at my drafts of the demonstration portion of each module. I'd sent these to Roxanne via email on Tuesday, but she'd had trouble viewing them (possibly because I produced some in Camtasia 5 at TIS and some in Camtasia 6 at the IT lab). Roxanne was able to look at the keywords and controlled vocabulary module over the last couple of days and create a script and notes tied specific times in that video. I shared the rest of the modules with her via webspace - hopefully this means she'll be able to view them better. Here are the notes I took while we viewed the other videos detailing some of the changes I need to make:

• Boolean & controlled vocabulary module - I need to include a segment where I go to the search history after doing all three searches.
• PubMed module - When you do the searches while logged into MyNCBI, your search terms are highlighted. I either need to redo the module while logged in or add highlighting in Camtasia to simulate this tool. I need to remove more of Camtasia's auto-zooming from this module - especially in each search's results, when limiting the search by date, and when view the search history at the end.
• Research vs review module - I currently have a slide with citations of two articles listed, then I have a video of each scrolling through each article and highlighting relevant aspects. The citation slide shouldn't make the titles of the articles look like links (since they don't actually link). Instead, I'll include a slide after we the video portion with links to the articles for future reference. In the video portion, I need to be sure that I show the article outline (below the abstract) for each.
• Scholarly vs popular module - I need to make the same changes to the citation slide as in the research vs review module. I'll also move the chart of criteria for distinguishing between scholarly and popular articles to the end - after the interactive portion.

Another overall issue to address is that some of these videos looked much fuzzier than others, despite the fact that I made each of them in pretty much the same way. I need to check in with Matt about why this might be the case and how to make sure that each video is as clear as possible.

Implementation, Part 2

Once I had a sense of how all of the exercises would work with Captivate, I went back to one of my more complicated exercises: scholarly vs. popular articles. I had three main questions that I used Captivate help and community forums to answer: 1) How can I combine two questions on one slide? 2) How can I insert links to external websites on a question slide? 3) How can I save students' answers to one question and use them in another slide?

Here's what I found out:

1. You can only have one question per question slide - no exceptions. This didn't seem to be a huge problem - I could simply have the "why" question on the next slide.
2. You can't actually put a link on a question slide! But, in Adobe's community forum, I found the following work-around: You can create a small, separate Captivate file that just contains one slide with a transparent button whose action is to open a URL. Publish this as a flash file and you can insert it as an animation in your question slide. A problem I have yet to solve with this is that the animation then shows a green Adobe Captivate loading bar which appears under the text on the question slide.
3. I read all kinds of information on user-defined variables, which seemed to be just what I needed in order to transfer students' answers into my chart. When I followed the steps described for using these variables, however, my menus didn't look the same and the options I needed to choose weren't available. Eventually, I realized that variables were a new feature in Captivate 4, and I am using Captivate 3.

So there went my plan of having a user-generated chart of criteria! I currently have these questions (and the research vs. review questions) entered as simple true/false questions. I then focused on creating slides to go after each question, showing clues that the article was scholarly or popular based on elements of the citation and abstract. I used SnagIt to take screenshots of the citation and abstract and added highlighting and call-outs as illustration. Here are a few examples:
I took both large (including the entire abstract) and small (1-2 excerpts) screenshots and ended up using all of the smaller ones because of the size of our end product. It's going to be a little smaller in order to accommodate a table of contents on the left and fit an existing template used by TIS and Library Instruction Services (so it will end up looking a little like this tutorial). Roxanne reviewed these screenshots by email and revised a few of them.

Implementation, Part 1

Given that there are somewhat more limited times that I can work at TIS than at the IT lab, I decided to tackle the interactive elements of these modules first, using Captivate.

Captivate is great because it has a wide variety of existing question types that are easy to use: true/false, multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer, matching, putting answers in order, and clicking on hotspots. It also includes some useful ways to integrate individual slides into an overall quiz or interactive exercise. Most interesting to me are:

1. Question pools - which allow you to include more questions than a user will need to answer in any given iteration of the quiz and then pulls a subset of these questions out at random. The use of random questions makes it more interesting and educational for an individual re-doing the same quiz.
2. Branching - You can set the slides up so that students go to a different slide if they get a question right than they do it they get a question wrong. This can allow for more detailed feedback and a more individually-based focus on particular topics.
3. The ability to have graded or ungraded questions. "Graded" in this context simply means that students will get a response about whether they answered correctly or not; this does not necessarily imply that their responses are being reported to a teacher or librarian or that they are received a grade for their participation. Whether questions are graded or ungraded can be determined separately for each question.

So, question slides are great, but... they can also be somewhat inflexible. My first implementation step, then, was to identify how the active learning elements associated with each module would best fit within the existing question slide types.

Scholarly vs. popular articles: Roxanne has been doing this activity from a blog post where she lists 15 articles and links to the citation and abstract for each one (mostly in Academic Search Complete) - there are a couple of exceptions where she links directly to a wikipedia article and a newspaper article. Students fill out a worksheet in groups, deciding for each article whether it is popular or scholarly and including reasons why they think so. These worksheets are ungraded, but are returned to Roxanne so that she can see how well students are getting the concepts. My idea of how to modify this exercise was to have a slide for each article that looked something like this:

• I wanted to store their responses and produce, after they had completed all the questions, a chart that included some of their criteria for distinguishing between scholarly and popular articles. They would then be shown a chart produced by the library instruction department with similar content to which they could compare their criteria. This has proved not quite feasible, but I'll include details about how I've revised this idea in my next post.
  

• Research vs. review articles: This exercise is much the same as the scholarly vs. popular exercise, but with only 8 articles.

• Keywords and controlled vocabulary: This module addresses broader, narrower, and related terms and shows example diagrams both as concept maps and and hierarchies. The students are then asked to create a hierarchy or concept map for each of the following subjects: microsopy and simians. I thought this could be implemented in Captivate either by having a list of terms and a series of text boxes arranged hierarchically (for students to fill in the blanks) or by having an open text box with instructions to indent for different levels of the hierarchy. Roxanne decided that filling in blanks would be a clearer exercise for students to engage in.

• Boolean operators and search strategies: The existing version of this module involves the TA leading the class in a stand-up/sit-down exercise based on hair color and eye color. As an alternative exercise for individuals working on this module alone, we would like to have a venn diagram representing animals that lay eggs and animals that fly and a number of illustrations of animals. Students would, in turn, drag and drop the appropriate animals into the appropriate area of the diagram for one OR statement, one AND statement, and one NOT statement. Unfortunately, Captivate's question slides don't really accomodate this. The ordering and matching question slides do incorporate the drag-and-drop action, but they work only for text and only when one target goes to one location (not many targets to one location). Matt suggested creating a drag and drop animation in Flash and importing into Captivate as an animation, but I'm not yet sure if this will work (in the time I have, that is, given that I know nothing about Flash). Roxanne and I decided that I would give up to a day's worth of time over to trying out Flash (more details coming in a later blog post...). If that doesn't work, we'll simply have a multiple choice or matching question, asking students to identify which diagram represents an OR statement, etc.
• A second exercise in this module gives students a series of citations and, for each one, asks them to create a search strategy to find other similar articles. These were straight-forward to enter as short-answer questions. They will be ungraded, given the variety of potential appropriate responses.
  

• Databases vs. the catalog: The exercise for this module gives studnets a list of citations of books, articles, and dissertations with certain elements highlighted (e.g. the article title highlight in one citation and the authors highlighted in another). Students are then asked whether they would look for this element in the library catalog or in a database. These questions were straight-forward to enter as true/false in Captivate. I took a stab at different messages to give if the wrong answer was chosen, and Roxanne reviewed and revised these by email.

• Searching in PubMed: This exercise involves studnets using some advanced features in PubMed to answer specific questions (e.g. the author of a 2006 article in a particular journal; topics of an article by a particular author in a particular journal, etc.). These were relatively simple to enter as short-answer questions. The questions had to be revised slightly, however, because we wanted them to be graded and therefore needed unambiguous answers. (Captivate allows you to enter up to 8-10 correct answers, but the students answer must match one of them exactly in order to be identified as correct.) For example, we asked students to identify MeSH for a certain article rather than the more vague "topics."
  

Deciding on Software

To begin catching up on what I've been doing...

Following my meeting with Matt, and at the recommendation of Roxanne, I took a look at the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) Wiki, which has a page on screencasting software: http://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/Screencasts. Besides the two commercial products that I can use through the iSchool's IT lab and the libraries' Technology Integration department (Camtasia and Captivate), this wiki suggested the following free and open source software: CamStudio, Jing, uTIPu, and Wink. From the brief descriptions of these programs on DiRT and the product descriptions on their developers' websites, I determined that none of them offered enough editting functionality for my purposes. Most basically, they do not allow separate audio and video editting. So my choice was down to Camtasia or Captivate. In the end, after meeting jointly with Matt and Roxanne, I decided to use both - Camtasia for the screen-captures and demonstrations (making use of its smoother video recording and zoom-and-pan capabilites) and Captivate for the quizzes and interactive portions.

Meeting with Matt

I met with Matt Lisle in Technology Integration Services today. He suggested that outlining and storyboarding the various tutorials should be my first step – even before I decide which software to use. So the sooner Roxanne and I decide how to re-divide the existing modules, the better. As for the software, he didn’t have any definitive suggestion on whether Captivate or Camtasia would be better for my purposes. Although the iSchool’s IT lab only has Camtasia, TIS has a copy of Captivate in their meeting room which I would be able to use (this worked out fine for another iSchool student last semester). Basically, Matt said that Camtasia is more user-friendly and is better for full-motion video recording while Captivate has a lot more built-in capacity for incorporating interactive features, such as simulations. Given this information, my first impression is that the added interactivity available through Captivate would be worth the extra effort it might take to learn to use it.

First thoughts on ways to re-divide module content

Given Bill Allen's (the BIO 206L prof who Roxanne has been working with) desire to have fewer, shorter modules, here are my first thoughts on how we could re-divide the material.

Current modules are:
• Introduction to Scientific Literature
• Using Databases Effectively
• Where and How to Search

Future tutorials could be:
1. Kinds of scientific literature and how literature fits into the research process (this would be a longer module)
2. Scholarly vs. Popular Articles (short)
3. Review vs. Research Articles (short)
4. Using Databases 1: Search Terms (keywords & controlled vocabulary)
5. Using Databases 2: Connecting Terms (Boolean operators, ways to limit your search)
6. Databases vs. the Library Catalog
7. Searching in PubMed

The “Using Databases Effectively” module seems most difficult to divide. "Introduction to Scientific Literature" could be divided into only two tutorials. It might make sense to do the searching PubMed module after the two database modules as a way to bring those concepts together. Then after they’ve talked about databases in depth for several weeks, they could discuss when not to use databases – when to use the library catalog instead.

Questions and brainstorming about implementation

• Do I need to get permission from any vendors for screen-shots?

• How can I incorporate the stand up/sit down method for explaining Boolean operators that Roxanne described as being so helpful? A number of tutorials used Venn diagrams to explain Boolean logic in a way that seemed intuitive.

• A way to incorporate multiple examples could look something like this:
Explanation ⇒ 1 example (chosen randomly from a pool of examples) ⇒ Go On OR See Another Example (randomly chosen from remaining examples)

• Include closed captions as an option, but don’t default to them. (Difference between closed captions, which would replicate the entire spoken text, and call-outs, which would highlight particularly important aspects of the narration.)

• It seems to me that using a physical worksheet for the activities is desirable, both so that students can easily refer back to their work in the class discussion and the end and so that they can be handed in to Roxanne for the purposes of evaluating the module’s effectiveness. I should be sure this isn’t a faulty assumption, though. Would there be a better way to serve both of these functions?

• Will this be hosted on the Life Science Library’s website or on blackboard so that it can be referred back to later? How else could we provide something for students to refer to later? If it will be used separately from the course it will be important to make it easy to navigate between different parts of the module. In other words, for an in-class implementation of this module, linear navigation makes the most sense, but if it might be used in other ways, other methods of navigation could be necessary.

• A possible solution to this could be to have two different versions that are only slightly different in navigation style.

• What do I need to know in order to do the implementation? Who do I need to talk to?

• Where should call-outs go in order to minimize how they disrupt the view of the entire screen?

• How will I strike a balance between having enough change in the visuals to make them interesting and having too much?

Notes from other tutorials

Here were some comments I had while looking through the sample web tutorials available on the Science Information Literacy Wiki. They aren’t all directly relevant to the work I’ll be doing, but simply represent my impressions of what I was seeing.

• In several examples, I heard a lot of background noise (static-like, white noise) when the audio is playing. This is distracting, especially when it makes it apparent that audio was not recorded continuously. This points to the value in having a good microphone.

• The size of the video within the browser screen is important. In some cases I saw videos that were too small, making the text difficult to read. In other cases, the video was too big, so that you couldn’t see the whole image from a screen capture without scrolling.

• I ran in to broken links with some regularity. I think that using a lot of screenshots rather than linking out to other resources can help minimize the possibility of getting dead links in my modules.

• I found it helpful to include relevant information both before and after the actual tutorial. For instance, it is helpful to know how long a module is beforehand, and also to be able to print something at the end of the module.

• My favorite example was from the Yale Whitney Medical Library. Some notable features include: an abbreviated but informative table of contents on the left throughout; switching back and forth between power point-style slides and screenshots, nice zooming in on screenshots so that sometimes the whole screen is viewable (for context) and sometimes there’s a focus on the particular search box being used.

What I've been reading

Here's a list of the articles I've read this week:

Armstrong, A. & Georgas, H. (2006). Using interactive technology to teach information literacy concepts to undergraduate students. Reference Services Review, 34(4), 491-497.

Aydelott, K. (2007). Using the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for science and engineering/technology to develop a modular critical-thinking-based information literacy tutorial. Science & Technology Libraries, 27(4), 19-42.

Bailin, A., & Pena, A. (2007). Online library tutorials, narratives, and scripts. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 33(1), 106–117.

Betty, P. (2008). Creation, management, and assessment of library screencasts: the Regis Libraries animated tutorials project. Journal of Library Administration, 48(3), 295-315.

Hrycaj, P.L. (2005), “Elements of active learning in the online tutorials of ARL members”, Reference Services Review, Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 210-8.

Ladner, B., Beagle, D., Steele, J.R. & Steele, L. (2004). Rethinking online instruction. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 43(4): 337-345.

Lee, S. & Burrell, C. 2004. Introduction to streaming video for novices. Library Hi Tech News 21(2), 20.

Long, H. & Culshaw, J. 2005. How we used demonstration authoring software to create tutorials. Computers in Libraries 25(8), 6-8.

Manness, J. (Summer 2006). An evaluation of library instruction delivered to engineering students using streaming video. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.

Pressley, L. (2008). Using videos to reach site visitors: A toolkit for today’s student. Computers in Libraries, 25(6), 18-22.

Tempelman-Kluit, N. & Ehrenberg, E. 2003. Library instruction and online tutorials: developing best practices for streaming desktop video capture. Feliciter 49(2), 89-90.

Tempelman-Kluit, N. (2006). Multimedia learning theories and online instruction. College & Research Libraries, 67(4), 364–369.

Tricarico, M.A., Tholl, S.V. & O’Malley, E. (2001). Interaction online instruction for library research: the small academic library experience. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 27(3), 220-223.

Xiao, D.Y., Pietraszewski, B.A., & Goodwin, S.P. (2004). Full stream ahead: Database instruction through online videos. Library Hi Tech, 22(4), 366-374.

Watson, J. (2004). Going beyond screen captures: Integrating video screen recording into your library instruction program. Feliciter, 2, 66-67.

Notes on Software

So far, I’ve mostly been reading some of the literature and seeing what various librarians who have used screen capture and video creating software think about these products. I still have to look in more detail at the information provided directly by the creators of these products on their capabilities.

Suggested criteria for evaluating software include:
• What capture methods are available (series of screenshots vs. full-motion recording)
• Quality of audio and video
• Accessibility features
• File formats available for output
• Editing and enhancement tools (textboxes, control over format, file types supported, continuous narration, ability to import into Flash)
• Availability of interactive elements
• Delivery and management options (need for plug-ins, online/offline viewing)

Although Qarbon Viewlet Builder is also mentioned in some of the older literature, by far the most frequently discussed products are Camtasia and Captivate. Here’s a summary of what folks are saying about these two software packages.

Camtasia:
• Can record video from screen, record power point slides with narration, or import media files
• Can record audio and video separately and also edit them separately
• Helpful tutorials on use of the product are available online
• Variety of video outputs available
• Can add audio tracks, transition between clips, add callouts to point to a certain part of the screen, and hotspots to particular points in the video
• Chose Camtasia because of its interactivity and ease of editing

Captivate:
• Record a series of screenshots rather than a single video recording (per 2007 article – is this still true?)
• Works better to add narration after screenshot capture, otherwise audio splits whenever a new screenshot is taken
• Captions automatically appear to explain actions, and can then be edited
• Allows frame by frame editing

Overall, both products are reviewed quite favorably with Camtasia in particular frequently noted for its ease of use.

Open source software software options that were mentioned include Screencast-O-Matic, Wink, Cam-Studio, Webinaria. I’ll look at these in more detail in Week 2 to see how they compare to the commercial options.

Welcome to my capstone blog!

As I work on my capstone throughout the summer I'll be keeping track of what I've learned here on my blog. I think this will offer me a useful way to think through what I've been doing as well as communicate that with my faculty advisor and field supervisor. I'm going to be posting on a weekly basis at the least.