[Stephen]

Hi,

I am curious as to how other institutions handle long term making echo captures available to students. In my scenario, we have the captures in each course publishing the related course in Blackboard. This happens to be a medical school. Once the course is over, and that Blackboard course is gone, what if students then want the capability next year to search and find a lecture on a specific topic? We have had several students comment that this would be excellent study tool for certifications and board exams, but as of now once the BB course is gone, there is no way to search and find lectures. I see the RSS publishing, but so far we have not been allowing the RSS feature since it provides the "enclosures" in the feed and there are some copyright concerns from faculty (no authentication). I do not see a way to produce an RSS feed without the enclosures (in other words provide only the links to the echo flash presentation and when they follow the link the ldap authentication kicks in) and the related info such as capture date, title, presenter, etc.

Also, I see you can add an RSS publisher to a course, but can you add a feed to a term? For example, we have First year medical school and 3 courses in it. If we wanted one RSS feed that fed all of the first year material, can that be done?


Finally, the Echo360 Search Indexing -- is that available only when viewing the echo or is it possible to search across courses or multiple echos for words? Example: searching for "Cardiovasular" and it would find all lectures within a term or course... ?

If anyone has any ideas for opensource portals that they have used to integrate the RSS feeds into a nice management system please share. I would like to have a student portal that is available to our medical students (not linked to a blackboard course) that can be searched and browsed for captures.

Thanks.

[Brett Dalton]

Stephen, on 11 January 2010 - 01:44 PM, said:

Hi,

I am curious as to how other institutions handle long term making echo captures available to students. In my scenario, we have the captures in each course publishing the related course in Blackboard. This happens to be a medical school. Once the course is over, and that Blackboard course is gone, what if students then want the capability next year to search and find a lecture on a specific topic?

Stephen

For a long time La Trobe had a more serious issue of Supp exams, students who take their exam later than the rest of the course due to extraordinary circumstances (illness, family problems or more recently bushfires). these exams can happen directly after normal exams (not a problem), prior to the next semester or even as late as part of the following year's assesment for that course (12 months later). The issue was our blackboard units were "reset" and reused each semester and the new students enrolled the old ones kicked. This caused loss of access to recordings and ALL the other material as well.

To address this and the growing problem of an archive of recordings that was growing indefinately we have instituted a subject lifecycle of 18 months from the creation of the LMS (blackboard) unit and associated recordings to it's removal. LMS Units are not recycled and new LMS units templated of the current units are created and populated via an automation system by request of the academics prior to each teaching period. This way we know that we can safely maintain access to students for an extended period and manage the overall storage requirements in the LMS and of our recordings. Our automation system also does the creation of units, schedules and user access for recordings automatically as well.

There will be exceptions and we handle these on a request basis but the number will be minimal. Some resources created to be reused year after year will also exist outside the lifecycle, again this is catered for but is by far the minority of material being only a few hundred pieces of material. Having previously worked in educational resource development even these have a shelf life of only 3-5 years or so be for they should be reviewed. Some of the old tapes I found when working there dated from the 80's, even if the content was good the presentation would have needed updating before being presentable.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Brett