Videos and First Time Presentations

Well, I duly checked out the new T189 .avi format videos on the website and downloaded the longest one at nearly fifteen minutes. It wasn’t far short of 95Mb and it took about 10-15 minutes in the background while I was doing other things. I opened it in Windows Media Player (I’m still using WMP 10 because I’m not so keen on the interface of WMP 11 which I have on my laptop). I got sound but no video … hmmm …

… back to the T189 course website and to the page about the .avi videos. It seemed that the download and installation of the Xvid codec should resolve the situation. I duly clicked the link, downloaded the file which was less than 1Mb, installed it and returned to the downloaded video. This time it played perfectly in the WMP window and I could maximise it to full screen if I wanted more detail.

Am I being a cynical old student to wonder if the reason Adobe’s Flash format was used to create the videos had something to do with the licensing agreement for the provision of 1500 or so Elements 5 software packages? Its astounding ability to gorge itself on every scrap of available computer memory surely wasn’t a newly discovered problem?

Since I did have audio-visual synchronisation problems with the DVDs that I was originally sent, it was nice to have one playing so smoothly in WMP. However, figures given on the T189 website indicate that the number of students having problems with the DVD tutorials amounted to about 5% of the 1500 or so students signed up. A significant number, to be sure, so I’m happy to download the new format videos in the background while I’m doing other tasks on the computer and let them take priority for the despatch of new discs.

In fact, the T189 websites says that students on dial-up will be getting priority for the new discs … that made me frown a little so I went to check on the website for the course hardware specifications. It doesn’t actually say you need broadband but, speaking personally, I think trying to do the course using dial-up is going to make it very hard work indeed given the amount of data that needs to be uploaded and downloaded during the course.

“As part of the course you’ll be asked to share your images. You’ll need to have access to an internet connection to be able to upload your images to the photosharing website and to view and comment on other people’s photographs.

You are likely to be spending most of your time studying online, which may mean extra charges to your telephone bill – unless you have a package that provides unlimited access to the internet”

Now the actual computer hardware specifications are pretty high (I’ve seen minimum specs mentioned on the conferences of of 2Ghz processor, 512Mb ram and either Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista – Windows 2000 cannot run the provided Elements 5 software) soI don’t think you’d expect many students to venture into T189 with a dial-up connection. Of course, I may be wrong because I don’t know the exact figures but even the 8Mb broadband users were saying that OpenStudio was slow. However that’s a whole different can of worms ….

Bill Larnach commented on my blog entry yesterday as follows:

“I’ve also done several first presentations and while problems have become expected, I’m not sure this should be accepted. In my view, it is unacceptable that the OU seems to use students on some courses to beta test software and online material. In many cases students are left to discover basic problems such as broken links or lack of proof reading, which can cause no end of confusion”

I do agree and it certainly seems tough on first time presentation students having to iron out all the glitches before a course really settles into its stride. However, I also think that the pressure on the OU to keep up with the increasing demand for technology-based and technology-backed courses might be part of the problem. I doubt if the first presentation of T189 was designed to handle the number of students that ended up registered. Hopefully lessons will be learnt and new pre-course testing procedures put into place that will lessen – although not completely banish – first time course presentation blues.

Nevertheless, some students on T189 were severely miffed to discover that you could withdraw from a 30 or 60 point course and get a partial refund but this didn’t apply to 10 point courses. There were calls for students to get a partial or even a total refund – some even called for the course to be halted. Obviously this won’t happen but I feel perhaps the OU ought to make some gesture of apology/recompense because T189 has certainly been a very rough ride at times for the first time presentation guinea-pigs.