We recently delivered a quick Canvas Booster session for Population Health Sciences Institute, which covered Quizzes, Discussion Boards, Accessibility and H5P. You can find the recording and resources for this session in our Canvas Community.
FMS TEL recently delivered a quick Canvas Booster session for Population Health Sciences Institute, which covered the themes below. You can find the recording for this session in our Canvas Community. Other resources are shared below – you may need to log in to Canvas to access these.
I only have 1 screen, can I view my notes while sharing my screen?
Whether you are creating a pre-recorded presentation or delivering live on zoom/teams, having only one screen can be quite limiting.
Delivering my FMS TEL webinars in the office was easy with my two monitor set up but when working from home I struggled with only my laptop. I prefer to have notes to keep me on track and to make sure I cover everything I want to say. I knew there must be a way to access my notes while presenting.
Below are step by step instructions on how I shared my presentation with my audience while viewing my notes, all done using only a laptop!
Open PowerPoint and start your slide show
Click the Ellipsis menu, then “Show Presenter View”
Click “Show Taskbar” or press the Windows key on your keyboard
Open Zoom/Teams, Click “Share Screen”. You should see 3 options from PowerPoint, choose PowerPoint Slide Show
To open Presenter View, navigate using the Alt + Tab buttons on your keyboard, or press the windows key and select presenter view from the Task Bar
Tips
Practice the steps before your session (you may want to open this post on a second device so you can access the instructions while you practice)
Add a blank slide or holding slide at the start of your presentation, especially if your first slide contains animations or slide transitions
Add a finishing slide, when your presentation ends the screen will stop sharing automatically (Zoom will display a pop up message to confirm this has happened)
Collecting and monitoring data relating to academic workloads
managing workloads
Universities have a responsibility to ensure that the workload allocations in their units are consistent and in line with their policies on workload allocation.
To achieve this there needs to be an accessible tool that can the capture agreed academic activities carried out on behalf of the University.
The FMS Workload Recording System (WRS) has been developed to allow staff to self-report their workload through a more transparent, equitable and collaborative process.
It is anticipated that this will lead to more informed PDR conversations, improved support around career development & wellbeing issues and allow equality diversity & inclusion considerations to be part of workload planning.
So, what does the system collect?
Previous work on collecting information around teaching activities highlighted the following key points:
The scope of the system needs to be wider than just teaching related activities
The auto population of activities through mining existing data sources was not always reliable
Self-reporting is essential to ensure accuracy of the data collected
Each activity needs to be standardised using its own tariff formulae, for example: tutees reported hours = no of tutees x 5 PARTNERS summer school lead hours = (no of students x 0.1) + 10
A working group was set up to specify what activities were to be recorded, each with its own tariff formulae to convert that activity into hours. These activities when they grouped into three distinct areas:
Teaching & Assessment
Taught Sessions
Assessment & Feedback
Tutees & Projects
Other
Research & Innovation
Research Projects
Research Awards
Research Applications
Others
Management, Administration & Citizenship
Unit
Faculty
University
External/Other
The system was developed in phases:
Phase I (4 months)
Develop the website with an individuals summary view and a collection of self-reporting forms, all driven by a database of workload questions and augmented by data from existing sources.
individual worklaod summary
workload self-reporting forms
Phase II (one month)
Release website to a small pilot group of users to collect user feedback. Development of basic reporting tools (user activities, evaluation reports and cohort workload summaries).
cohort/unit workloads
Phase III (4 months)
Refine any existing usability issues raised by pilot group and develop the advanced reporting & administration tools required for full release.
Phase IV
Full release of the system.
So where are we now ?
The FMS Workload Recording System (WRS) went live in July 2022 to a pilot group of 158 academics.
The next stage (PHASE III) is to review what additional features or changes to the system are required and then prepare the system for its release to the whole Faculty.
Dr Aleksey Kozikov, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics presented on 3D holograms and showed examples of using them in lecture theatres.
Dr Aleksey Kozikov discussed the uses of 3D holograms and showed examples, including the projection of lab equipment, objects, and presenters into lecture theatres.
In traditional teaching approaches, students are taught in a sitting and listening manner. To provide a more participatory learning experience, help students to visualise, clarify the taught concepts and enhance the way students learn, we are planning to introduce 3D “holograms” into the real space learning environment. We will discuss ideas to use holograms of research facilities and extend to any practical activities that are otherwise not possible to do in a lecture theatre
This can enhance in-person teaching and could be a resource used in FMS.
There could be live projections of speakers or leading experts in the field, who could not be there in person. They could join the conversation from abroad but look like they are physically in the room with other speakers.
Lecturers could explain a piece of equipment which was previously too cumbersome to transport to lectures. Students could see a visible representation of equipment beside them as they discuss it.
We could show experiments without the person and equipment physically being in the room. This could be done in multiple rooms simultaneously, relieving the need for large lectures halls or repeated sessions.
This post details some easy tips and tricks to speed up your caption editing process using Notepad and Word.
This post assumes users are using Panopto (ReCap), therefore Panopto guidance is linked for uploading and downloading caption files. Guidance for other products such as Streams, Vimeo and YouTube can be found on their own sites.
In FMS TEL many team members regularly work with captioning videos – whether these are our own instructional videos or webinars, or student learning materials. Recently a few of us in the team have been talking about how we caption videos – specifically, what processes we use. There are some of us in the team who use the inline caption editor in Panopto, and use speed controls to manage the flow of speech so they can correct as they go. Others prefer to download the caption files and work with them in a separate program.
Both methods have their pros and cons. Working within the online editor is often best for short videos, or those with very few corrections to be made. Sometimes, though, it is easier to manage longer or more error-prone caption files in their own window. This gives more space to see what you’re doing – as long as you can avoid messing up the file structure. You can also use proofing tools in Word to speed things along or cut out repeated mistakes.
The rest of this post details some tips you can try to speed up your own process if not using the online editor.
You may find that for the bulk of the editing you don’t even need to be listening to the video – the errors can sometimes be evident just from text.
To work with captions outside of Panopto, you’ll first need to download the caption file. If there is no file to download, you’ll need to request automatic captions first. The caption file can be opened in Notepad. From there, you can edit each line of text separately. You must not change the file structure – so do not edit any of the other lines in the file, even the empty ones.
The file repeats in structure every 4 lines. The first is the sequence number of the caption, the second is the timestamp displayed in hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds, the third is the spoken text and the fourth is an empty line.
If you want to take advantage of some more proofing tools, try copy and pasting your entire file into Word. This will allow you to use tools such as Spelling and Grammar check to remove duplicate words or transcribed stuttering sounds, and can also draw your attention to other oddities. The Spelling and Grammar tool automatically moves you through your document, saving time scrolling and searching. As well as checking spelling, this can also help trim unnecessary words from the text, making it faster to read.
Find and Replace is useful, and can help…
If a name has been consistently misspelled – for example Jo/Joe.
If the speaker has a filler word that can be removed (I say “kind of” as filler so always search for and remove it from the captions!).
To replace key numbers or years that have been spelled out with their numerical representations (e.g. ninety-nine percent -> 99%).
Filtering out inappropriate language if it has been misheard by the auto software – if you see it once you can search the whole document quickly.
Filtering out colloquial spellings (gonna -> going to).
A good tip to ensure you only find whole words is to search them with spaces before and after the word itself. You can also use the ‘more’ option dialog and check the ‘whole words only’ box.
These extra options can help speed things up.
If you have been deleting a lot of items and adding spaces in their place, you might also want to do a find and replace for two spaces together and replace with one space. Run this a few times until there are no results. Similarly, you could look for comma-space-comma if you have removed a lot of filler.
These steps won’t fix everything, but can cut out some of the bulk and help speed up your process. After using these tools, read through the captions carefully again to fix any leftover errors.
Last month we welcomed Michael Hughes to the FMS TEL team, as Learning Technologies Developer.
Michael is one of six Web Developers within the team who create and maintain Web-based systems which support learning and teaching across the Faculty, University and beyond. He brings with him great enthusiasm and experience of developing innovative systems. One of his first projects is to work with the RolePlayNorth team to redevelop an old, but business-critical, system that has reached end of life. He will be co-developing this with Dan Plummer (FMS TEL systems usually have a least two developers, to help ensure nothing is one person deep!) and collaborating with the wider team in other activities.
“Coming from a manual labour background and specifically working in the Traffic management and Utilities industry for the past 8 years. Seeing a lack of development and online tools to help assist doing the job led me to learning how to code.
Industries like those are the backbone of the economy and the lack of basic tech was eye opening. Working one day I asked one of my more experienced co workers about the marker post locations (white sticks 100 meters apart on the motorway) which we used everyday to plan out roadworks. Finding out that most workers didn’t have the information where they are and if your traveling from say A69 or the A66 coming to the A1 you have no idea if you have to travel south or north to come south as to not miss your starting location for roadworks or even worse a car crash which could mean a 30 minute turn around if guessed incorrectly.
This idea pushed me to working on the project that got me the learning technologies position here at Newcastle University.”
Michael Hughes
We are excited to have Michael on the team and cannot wait to see what he will accomplish!
How do oral presentations work for 100% online modules?
Presentations helps students put across an idea while expressing their personalities, which is hard to do in an essay.
Introduction
Oral presentations are a popular choice of assessment in the Faculty of Medical Sciences, especially in our e-Learning modules. Students are asked to submit a pre-recorded presentation to Canvas and the markers watch the presentations at a time and place that suits them.
Diarmuid Coughlan, module leader for ONC8028 Practical Health Economics for Cancer, has kindly agreed to walk us through how the Virtual Oral Presentation element works on his module.
The Assessment
This year we had 14 students on the module. We asked the students to create a 15 minute presentation using either Zoom, Panopto (Recap) or PowerPoint.
We informed the students right at the start of the module that an oral presentation was part of the assessment and 4 weeks into the module we provided a formative assessment. The formative assessment allowed students to familiarise themselves with their chosen software, gain experience talking to a camera and also get some limited feedback on their presentation skills.
The submissions are double marked by 2 markers. Marking is completed separately by each marker outside of Canvas, then markers meet to discuss which marks/comments would be entered into Canvas and made visible to each student.
The Set Up
We provided 2 submission points in Canvas:
Recording Submission Point:
This area was used for the marking. It was set up as Media Recording for MP4 uploads (max of 500 mb) with a Text Entry option for Panopto users (no size limit).
We allowed students to choose which technology they were most comfortable with and provided video and written instructions for Panopto and Zoom. PowerPoint instructions were added later as an option with links to guidance provided by Microsoft.
View of instructions in Canvas
We also provided some instructions so students could crop their recordings to comply with the 15 minute time limit.
You are limited by time so remember to edit your recording so it is no longer than 15 minutes. Instructions: Windows | Mac | Panopto
Slide Submission Point:
This area had a 0 point value. It was set up as a File upload area for students to submit their slides as .ppt or .pdf, this allowed us to get a turnitin plagiarism score for each presentation as well as a reference copy of the slides, should anything be unclear in the video recordings.
How did it go?
There was a lot of fear from students initially. We encouraged students to give it a go, informing them that we were not trying to trick them. We provided clear guidance on what we expected and provided a rubric with a breakdown of points, clearly showing only a small percentage of the grade would be based on their presentation style and delivery. The content of the presentation was the most important part!
The use of technology was varied:
As markers we also had to overcome our fears of technology.
PowerPoint is easier once you know how to access recordings (you have to download the file, then click start slideshow).
Sometimes the Panopto recordings were hard to find, especially if students had experience of using the technology in Blackboard and did not follow the Canvas instructions correctly.
What are your next steps?
We only provided grades with a short feedback comment last year, we plan to provide more extensive feedback going forward
We will add more video content into the module as examples of how to create engaging slides and showcase our presentation styles – hopefully leading by example
We would also like to provide examples of a good presentation vs a bad presentation
When captioning and transcribing, what is meant by ‘accuracy’? When are captions good enough?
In FMS TEL and LTDS many team members regularly work with captioning videos, in particular for our own instructional videos or webinars. Recently a few of us have been talking about how we caption videos and how we decide what to correct. After discovering we all had differences of opinion about what to keep and what to edit, it seemed like a good idea to think through the issues.
This webinar from the University of Kent features Nigel Megitt from the BBC talking about priorities when captioning and audio describing TV programme. It includes research on how people with different levels of hearing feel about captions.
Commercial captioning companies offer a range of levels of detail. We do not outsource these tasks, but the predefined service levels can help clarify what decisions are made when captioning. Is verbatim captioning better than a lightly edited video? An accurate set of captions or transcript should include hesitations and false starts, but a more readable one might remove these for fast comprehensibility and more closely resemble the script of a speech.
Key Considerations
Destination – who is the audience? What do they need?
Speaker(s) – how can they be best represented? How do they feel about you editing their speech for clarity (e.g. removing filler words) vs correcting captions to verbatim?
Timescale – how fast do you need to turn this around? Longer videos and heavier editing takes longer.
Longevity – will this resource be around for a long time and reach a wider audience? If so it may merit extra polish.
Once you have broadly decided on the above, you can deal with the nitty-gritty of deciding what to fix, edit or remove. Deciding on your approach to these common issues means you won’t have to make a decision each time you find an error in your transcript. If working with a few other colleagues on a larger project you might want to agree with each other what standard you are aiming for to create uniformity.
Editing Decisions
The ASR occasionally misunderstands speech and adds incorrect captions that may be distracting, embarrassing or inappropriate, for example adding swearing or discriminatory language that the speaker has not in fact used. Checking the captions for these is a great start, and is likely to be appreciated by all speakers!
We don’t usually speak in the same way we write. Normal speech is full of little quirks that don’t appear in text. Some of these include…
False starts (If we take… no actually let’s start with… yes, OK, if we take question 4 next…)
Hesitations (um….ah…)
Filler Words (you know, like, so…)
Repeated words (You can do this by… by reading the text)
Other Considerations for Captioning
Remember that captions will be read on screen at the pace of the video. This means that anything that you can do to increase readability may be useful for the viewer. This includes simple things like…
Fixing initialisms and acronyms (PGR not p g r, SAgE not sage)
Fixing web and email addresses (abc1@ncl.ac.uk, not A B C One At Newcastle Dot A See Dot UK)
Adding quotation marks around quotes.
You may also consider…
Presenting numbers using figures rather than words (99% not ninety-nine percent)
Removing awkward breaks (When Panopto separates a final word from its sentence.)
Fixing inaccurate punctuation like full stops in the wrong places, or commas and apostrophes (this is quite time consuming).
Considerations for Transcription
As well as the editing and tidying jobs above, before beginning to work with your file, consider whether or not the timing points are going to be important, and how you are going to denote different speakers, or break up the text. For example, for an interview you may need to denote various speakers very clearly. By contrast, for a training webinar, even if there are two presenters it might not be crucial to distinguish them. Instead it might be better to add headings for each slide so that the two resources can be used side by side.
Once you have decided on what to edit and what to ignore, your process will move along much faster as you won’t need to decide on the fly.
Keep an eye on the blog over the next few weeks for tips on how to quickly manage and edit your caption and transcription files.
Personal Tutoring is the process of assigning the availability of university staff for student tutoring. It is not actually the process of assigning individual students to individual staff. Staff in the faculty are assigned to programme groupings/pots (not individual programmes), these groupings have a lead administrator that can then work out by looking at the expected student intake whether they need more staff resource, or can free it up for others.
The faculty admin team have undertaken this process for many years using excel spreadsheets and email communications to pass the information back and forward. This kinds of activity is both time consuming and prone to errors caused by duplicate copies of data and missed communications.
This is the perfect example of a process that can be done better using a web application, the kind of work the Technologies Developers in FMS TEL undertake all the time.
No time to plan properly
Sometimes a project comes to the unit that needs to be completed in a short time frame. Ideally the amount of time spent on a new website would be evenly spread between specifications, design, implementation, testing and support/improving., it may even go through many loops of these processes.
When a project does not have the luxury of time, then all these steps need to be compressed and decisions made on which steps need to be prioritised . In the case of personal tutoring the design phase and specifications where collaborated from the old Excel spreadsheets and turned into a simple tabular wireframe display. These spreadsheets where also identified as the origin of the data the site would be based off and import scripts planned accordingly. No complex interface features where offered, just a clean display of the data, with filters and stats to help the tutoring assignments. As for the implementation of the site, we decided to host the new site on top of another, saving time on hosting framework and infrastructure. We chose a site that had similar tools (FMS Projects, which has a statistics section) and tools we could utilise. We also based the core of the new site off knowledge and experience the team was used to (API’s and data tables, spreadsheet importing / exporting). Finally the testing and support side was compressed, keeping the interface simple, reducing the need for support and documentation. The limited number of users the site may have, also helps support as we can offer short term direct guidance.
With all these measures, we managed to reduce a development process that could take 6 months down to 3.
The Results
The Personal Tutoring site is due to go live in July 2022. We managed to write and get a functional version of the site done in roughly 2 months. This left 1 month planning the release, testing and show casing the site to the customers and making improvements from their feedback. Overall we are pleased with the structure and quality of the site. The code design is based on solid principles and should offer a degree of flexibility when Personal Tutoring gets used and the inevitable suggested improvements come through.
If you are interested in this topic and wish to learn more, please contact:
This post highlights the work done by SDS and FMS TEL to support remote exams over the past few years. Successful techniques for keeping students informed and supported are discussed, including student voice.
This work was also subsequently presented at the Newcastle University Learning and Teaching Conference 2022. Newcastle Staff can view the poster here for an overview.
This work centres on how exams subject to oversight from professional bodies – in this case the General Dental Council – could be run with adequate probity when these could not be undertaken in person.
The first element of this is to run the exams ‘live’ rather than as a 24h format. This meant that teaching staff and professional staff could be on hand to resolve any technical difficulties or make invigilation decisions.
A variety of question designs were also thought through. The final format was a ‘stimulus’ question type on Canvas, allowing an image to be shown with answer options alongside. Now this question type can also be used with Inspera exams.
The support of students with SSPs was also a key consideration, and rest breaks were granted across the board when exams were very lengthy. Students were asked what they thought about the probity measures put in place, such as the use of an exam declaration, and checking responses which may have been copy-pasted. Overall, the response was positive.
A key element in the smooth running of these exams was the preparation offered to students beforehand, such as clear messaging via email and the opportunity to practice with the exam environment before undertaking their summative assessments. 99% of students agreed that they had been well-supported throughout the process and during the exams themselves via the Zoom exam hotline. Most calls were students double-checking their responses had been submitted, rather than having technical issues.
Learning from these exams has already been carried forward for digital exams running through the new Inspera exam system, and the confidence staff and students have in the procedure means that any future changes to circumstances will be much easier to navigate for these teams and cohorts.
