progress

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During this project we used a collaborative blog for members to capture their thoughts, frustrations, successes, ideas and 'to do' lists. Publishing this blog would not be practical as the writing style is mostly very informal and rambling, but was a key process that all were involved in as it has captured every critical aspect of the project. Along with the internal project blog is this progress page where a more structured and formal record of the project sits. The purpose of keeping this public progress is in the hopes that it will assist others who come after us and can benefit from our journey.

June 2008
Starting the project we had some presumptions that we were working from. Whilst this wiki is easy to use, as a web design teacher I was really looking for something that would allow my students to collaborate online without any real level of expertise in web design and possibly even fairly low expertise in word processing. We tested out several wiki's but found that whilst we could use them easily to mark text up to a page we couldn't really get great looking pages easily. For example, insert a table and you have to know how many rows you want, tabbing won't give you an extra row. Positioning images without tables for structure just didn't work well, and we quickly felt that we were going to end up with shoddy looking pages with stuff all over the place. After a couple of weeks of high frustration for Katrina followed by some frustration for Les we ditched using a wiki for our students. We still believe that the wiki can play a huge role in education, it just wasn't giving us what we were looking for.
 * 1) A wiki would be perfect and it would be really easy to make great looking web pages.
 * 2) An edna group would be perfect.
 * 3) We wouldn't need a blog on top of all that
 * WIKI**

Katrina jumped straight in and created an Edna group and then discovered that it is just a moodle (don't get me wrong saying 'just' we love moodle!) In fact we had far better control of our own moodle that sits on our own server and did not continue with the group.
 * EDNA GROUP**

Well the 2 'perfect' tools got ditched and that left us the blog that we thought was pretty unimportant, but actually has been the whole central hub for the actual project team and it has performed that task beautifully!
 * BLOG**

Just goes to show how wrong presumptions can be.

July 2008
The next important starting point for the project was to locate and test some software.

In case it is not obvious Katrina is a staunch MAC user and Les is a PC man who decided to purchase a MAC to 'see what it's about'. iWorks contains a program called **KEYNOTE** Keynote create presentations so you could say it is quite similar to Power Point. There is a 30 day trial available and the software is very reasonably priced so Katrina spent much of July testing it out as a way to create the back end parts of the multimedia learning objects we planned to trial. The Keynote file sizes were considerably larger than Power Point and we felt that every bit of file size was going to be critical in online files as there are still users on dial up speeds so we did not proceed with purchasing the software. It is however very simple to use and for a MAC user who does not have Power Point and wishes to distribute via CD or DVD the tool is fantastic.
 * iWorks08**

This software allows the user to capture anything that is happening on the screen, creating a movie. You are able to record voice along with the demonstration. Katrina downloaded the package, installed it and recorded the following little demonstration, all within around 15 minutes whilst cooking dinner! The movie is not fantastic, but it demonstrated the ease of use and capabilities of it so well - NO instructions were read, Katrina just pointed and went for it! media type="file" key="mail for mac.mov" width="381" height="381"
 * iShowU**

After a few more little test movies it was decided that the ridiculous price of around $20 was more than worth the effort. Of course once you are using the purchased version there is no watermark.

Stomp comes from the same makers of iShowU and is a movie compression utility. Funnily enough Katrina discovered that Quicktime compressed movies way more efficiently and in fact if they were compressed with Quicktime and then with Stomp they actcually doubled in size! We didn't bother purchasing Stomp.
 * STOMP**

We were concerned about issues that may arise for our students revolving around plug in needs for their browsers to use multi media files. Students could well be in working environments that had firewalls or permission issues that may prevent them viewing some types of files or downloading necessary plug ins. We decided to take a 2 pronged approach to this and provide all the multimedia learning objects in both flash and quicktime format and find out what issues might arise and hope that they would always be able to interact with one or the other.
 * FLASH**

Flash was one of our choices. What was most interesting about this whole side of things was that firstly MOST students had no problems whatsoever with either format (which is what we hoped) and one or two did have some permission issues, but when we attended the Moodle MOOT just as all was happening, lo and behold we learned that the moodle would actually handle the whole issue for the student. What a corker!

LESSON LEARNED: the issue of plug in problems has been solved well in advance by Moodle, demonstrating another reason why this platform is so widely used.

After some issues with the abilities of Power Point in converting presentations out to movie files Katrina purchased the full version of quicktime. It is very easy to use and provided the outputs that we were looking for.
 * QUICKTIME**

This one was a 'no-brainer' for Katrina as the software had been tested in projects in past years and is great for audio work.
 * AUDACITY**

Whilst some team members had previously had some experience with Elluminate or other similar virtual classroom tools, none of us had truly run actual classes for ourselves. Katrina was elected to be the main online facilitator and attended 3 online training sessions run by Elluminate on using the tools it has.
 * ELLUMINATE**

Elluminate was used for both team meetings and the student trials during the project. Unfortunately the room that was provided to the project free of charge did not have the capacity to record the sessions.

This project has built on project 022 in 2007 (under LearnScope funding) where Moodle became the tool that made the project the huge success that it was. We therefore continued with our use of the Moodle platform.
 * MOODLE**

August 2008
During June and July there was only minimal activity from the other Team members as Les and Katrina were responsible for the bulk of the background work on sourcing software and tools for the project. August became the key month for pulling together what we had now tested and the tools we felt were worth pursuing and creating the framework of the actual trial and the breadth of invovlement from the J2S group.
 * CONSULTATION WITH KEY TEAM MEMBERS OF J2S**

The team at J2S comprised Management and Trainers and input was sought on the most beneficial unit that would suit the student groups that were being selected for us to work with.

It was decided that the key learning topic would be Email Etiquette as communication is a part of pretty much every training package and so would give us a generic but relevant topic regardless of the student groups real studies.

J2S provided a basic power point presentation they use for staff training as the core 'content' to develop the multimedia learning object from.

Team meetings were conducted using Elluminate.

August 8 team meeting allowed us to have Robyn Jay present and formed our mid project report.

Katrina and Les now worked on the actual creation of the learning objects and moodle course. Team members began to look at their students and make selections for the trial.

September 2008
Probably the most frustating or up-and-down month of the project particularly for Katrina. There seemed to be a few issues still cropping up with file sizes and other technical stuff so Katrina decided that maybe she should ditch the MAC software and use some PC software on her Parallels windows installs. LESSON LEARNED: a virtual install of windows is not always sufficient when you want to work with multimedia. Katrina should have learned this better a couple of years earlier when trying to get midi oriented software working on a virtual machine.

After many frustrations Katrina returned to the MAC software, solved the issues that were occuring there and got back on track.

This of course led to a slight delay of the proposed timetable for beginning the student trials but fortunately we were not running on a tight schedule and could comfortably accommodate this.

Katrina now found that she could at times feel very lost in connection with which process was the correct one as she was doing so many trials both of amounts of software and combinations of software processes.

Funny how setbacks or frustrations can become catalysts for fantastic things. Katrina found some open source mind mapping software - VUE and found it exceptional for putting those processes into the correct order. If something changed then it was simple to reflect the change in the map. It became obvious that this tool would also be fantastic for use with students and for assisting to create the final project output.
 * MIND MAPPING with VUE**

Below is an example of an early map used to help in planning and implementing.

**October 2008**
Finally the month the whole team had been waiting for all year - the actual student trials. J2S were fantastic in providing us with 3 groups of students ranging from QLD to Sydney to Wollongong. The trials ran over a 3 week period as follows:
 * 1) **Induction week.** Elluminate session to induct students into using the tools and ensure instructions are understood.
 * 2) **Email Etiquette session**. Elluminate session to hold an interactive class discussion based on students preparing material in advance.
 * 3) **Tutorial trial and feedback session**. Elluminate session to examine the use of the iShowU movies and complete extensive feedback.

This was an incredibly worthwhile event to participate in. Though we have been moodle administrators since mid 2007 we were totally self-taught. We had no idea what we didn't know. Now we do!
 * MOODLE MOOT**

One of the really big things Katrina picked up was the ability of the moodle to serve out multimedia movies without the students having to worry about plug ins, if you just link to them inside the moodle. Katrina had been going to the trouble of embedding the movies into web pages then uploading the pages and just linking to them from the moodle. If this had been the only thing learned the MOOT would have been totally worthwhile.


 * Key learning from the MOOT**
 * Moodle will handle multimedia plugins for the viewer
 * LAMS will allow students to follow a path the trainer decides on (which in some subjects would actually be useful to avoid students 'skipping' important things with or without realising.
 * It would be well worthwhile to complete the Moodle Certification course as we would learn so much.
 * Many tips on customising themes so the moodle interface is exactly how we want it.

November 2008 [[image:star.png align="right"]]
The final month of the project has involved: Team members contributing feedback. Evaluation of the feedback.

Pulling all of the project together into a coherent report that can be submitted as a website to be uploaded to education.au and linked to from this wiki.