1. Documentation set for creating lectures:

Notes from meeting with Andrea on Thursday 4 May 2000.

1. Andrea estimates that he will have about 6 one-hour lectures. This could increase as new material is added to the course.

2. The usual format of Andrea’s live course is that he lectures for about an hour and then the rest of the time (in half-day segments) is spent with the students doing exercises that reinforce the concepts from lecture. Andrea wondered how we might duplicate something like this for this course.

• We need a server (Andrea says a normal PC could do the job) where the exercises and compiler are available to the students.
• Mechanism for users to log into server and gain access to the exercises. Question: in an asynchronous environment, how long do we allow accounts to reside on the server? Give them 6 months to complete course? One year?
• We will need a tutorial with a simple example that demonstrates how to use the server.

3. The students normally build an application while taking the course, completing it by the end. It was agreed that there would be one project that every student would do who takes the course (i.e., they don’t get to “ pick” their own application. This will need to be supported through a start-up tutorial. Successful completion of the application would be the criteria for determining mastery of the course material.

• Question: we would need another avenue for evaluating course competencies for user data since we won’t have the completed applications to review.

4. To support the course exercises and the course in general, set up an e-mail/feedback form. This mail would go to the “TA”-like person for filtering and forwarding to Andrea only those questions requiring his attention.

5. We reviewed what activities Andrea would need to be involved with for the success of this course:

• Produce lectures using ClipBoard in Building 559’s lecture recording “ ;studio.”
• Provide existing reading material as handed out in RT class
• Prepare tutorial for the exercises

6. Producing lectures at various levels of speed/quality. We discussed briefly with Andrea the idea that he would be recording his lectures at the “best quality” level and that in post-production, his lectures would be offered to users at three different bandwidth levels: fastest connections, medium and slow (modem) connections.

7. During the discussion, Chuck suggested that we could try running the course over a limited timeframe for a specific group of users. For example, 15 users sign up to take the online course during the time period June 1 to June 14. During that period, the user will work at his/her own pace, but finishing the course before June 14. Andrea would be available to students during a certain period each day (3:00-4:30 each afternoon perhaps). They can ask questions of him, tell him about particular problems they are having with the website, etc. Ideally, information from this could be used by Andrea to make changes to his slides or reading materials “on the fly.” This would be a good opportunity to perform a user experience test on pedagogy (more below). What chat room device might we use for “office hours” with Andrea?

ISSUES TO BE TACKLED:

1. Server

• What will it look like? Who will pay for it? (no budget line for supplies in dodd money, but could fuy from kdi supplement or collab ~2500
• Where will it reside? At UM or at CERN?
• Who will maintain / administer accounts? – Chuck suggests that Andrea may want to control the server himself.

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Notes from meeting with Andrea 5 May 2000

Took Andrea over to building 559, Room 14 where he successfully tried out his first attempts at Clipboard. We discovered the need for an external microphone to cut down on noise from the hard drive and white noise in the background. The room has a “tinny” sound to it, but I think it will be okay. We will ask Mick to provide a backdrop so that it doesn’t look like the lectures were recorded from a prison cell (I even this it would be nice to have a backdrop that identifies him with CERN).

Andrea and I will get together again on Monday in building 40. I will take him to building 559 to do his first real lecture capture, which I will convert to the various formats and take back to Michigan for review.

STUFF TO DO:

Put sheet in 559 with phone numbers: Chuck’s cell phone, Connie’s office, e-mail addresses

Put real mouse with portable in 559

Small light

Better microphone

Install office software

Get CD burner or firewire hard drive

Documentation set for creating lectures:

Create PPT slides and from within PPT convert to GIF. On older versions of PPT, use convert to html and take folder of slide gifs. On newer PPT and select convert to GIF.

Launch Clipboard

Open Settings and set to 320 x 240

Open Lecture and select directory. Choose folder with slide gifs.

Open Lecture and select Record Lecture

In Dialog Box, choose Source and select S-Video. Then choose Compression and select Photo-JPEG and 8 frames/sec. Then choose Audio and be sure that external microphone is selected and microphone is working.

Click red Record button and begin to record your lecture. Click Pause button to stop briefly and when finished with Recording, click Stop (same as Red record button.

After this, need the documentation for Recompressing the Lecture, Saving either to CD Burner or external hard drive

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