Cantvas strikes again- can any one help?
Apr 03, 2013
I begin by reminding you I am a teacher and not a technologist. Bear with my inevitable mistakes in techie terminology!
I will try to make this "abridged". I spent a year on sabbatical learning every thing I could about how to design my own instructional materials for LMS delivery. At that time, our LMS was WebCT. I remember the general tone being that this type of work was way out of my reach because of the multimedia nature of my work. I researched my software options extensively and decided on Articulate. One of my subject areas is American Sign Language which necessitates the use of much video. While I developed most of my work in "Quizmaker" the most used activity (a vocabulary play list) is developed using Engage. I have been so satisfied with the experience of developing and seeing my creative vision come to fruition using Articulate. My online activities finally had the dimension and interactivity I wanted and felt my students would respond to.
When I returned from sabbatical in the fall, ready to roll out my new materials, our LMS was being migrated from WebCT to Canvas. ARRGGHHH! SO- now, while my students could "benefit" I could no longer "track" their progress and any hope of data capture was lost since Canvas does not "support" SCORM.
In my first semester using the materials (last Fall) I also learned:
- Engage materials will not work for ANY of my students who are Mac based
- The integrity of functionality of any of my materials is subject to the browser my students open it in. Last semester, only Google would work. Two weeks ago, the Chrome update rendered ALL my activities impotent. They wouldn't even play. My team of technology experts worked on it for 24 hours and this is the ultimate answer they came up with:
"Your Articulate software is generating Flash content that’s compatible with earlier versions of Flash, so it’s trying to be as compatible with older technology as possible. The problem is that the latest version of Flash in Chrome seems to be having a hard time dealing with the fact that’s older technology for some reason."
The
end result has been my students having to switch between browsers again
and
again and again trying to get one activity or the other to work. They
also know I can't track any of their actual progress or work, so
ultimately
most of them just don't do it. Additionally, some activities just won't
work at all (they did last semester) but only sometimes and no one can
answer
that one. Just for clarification, my students and my language lab all
have the "required" browsers, updates, etc. regardless, my Articulate
activities are only intermittently working in Canvas and the amount of
extra work it has created in "putting out fires" is simply no longer
justifiable.
I can't salvage this semester, but
need to weigh out my options for semesters ahead. I would welcome
suggestions for best alternate delivery method. I considered hosting with
articulate but it would cost me far too much money (I do have a request in with the money gods). I would love my
materials to be housed in a place where students can easily get to them,
benefit from the interactivity and have a 95% chance that things will work
efficiently and accurately ( I would actually even settle for 90%). It was suggested I make a CD copy as
"back-up" for all of my students. I'm not crazy about how
fragile DVD/CDs are. Students break them, they get damaged in sun and
scratched in book bags. I am also assuming there is no way to get a "report" if students have a CD.
I have reviewed an played with SCORM Cloud- unfortunately it treats every SCORM package as a "class" which means I would need to find a way to create a multi-SCO package and upload with a "manifest" as one package. Sounds like a coding nightmare to me.
At this point, I would love to find some other way to deliver the materials, but don't even know what my options are. I do know this, my school will not financially help me support any option outside of Canvas, so I need to keep it priced so I can pay for it myself. Is there a way to publish to some other space that will free up the limitations imposed by Canvas? Can I publish to my own personal web space? Is there a publishing option that will allow me to capture student score reports? We have an entire Language Lab with 50 computer stations. Can I somehow deliver the content that way? I am really seeking solutions at this point that will allow me to work outside of Canvas. I have been a very good sport trying to get my e-learning vision to work in the LMS my entire district has committed to, but I think I am done. Are there other LMS options I can get just for myself? and heard my students in that direction? I welcome even the most out of the box thinking. If I don't find a solution, I think I will have to return to brick an mortar instruction!!! Thanks!
Allie
6 Replies
Allie,
Sorry to hear about the issues you've encountered. I'll give you my two cents, but keep in mind that many people on this forum (and elsewhere) disagree with how I believe the future of e-learning will unfold. I've always believed you should never have all your eggs in one basket. As you mentioned Canvas doesn't support SCORM tracking so if you have everything in SCORM then you are up the creek. Likewise, the existing version of Engage doesn't work across multiple platforms. I would suggest you might take this time to reevaluate your course design so that it doesn't matter what LMS you use in the future or if one cog somehow fails in the future.
Here's what I mean. The core of any e-learning program today (IMHO) needs to be short videos. (typically 5-10 minutes) These videos can be hosted on a variety of sites (YouTube, Vzaar, Brightcove, etc or even upload MP4's to your LMS/servers) and playback is now pretty consistent across most providers. I actually upload videos to my own servers as backups, but run them off off of these services most of the time. (I personally use Vzaar because it's almost as good but only $79 a month compared to $200 for Brightcove) The software detects the device used and delivers the appropriate version.
If the videos are interesting enough, you don't have to worry so much about tracking because students will watch them and because in most cases you don't really need a report for a 3-4 minute video anyway. You then use a variety of programs to create interactivity which is then linked to inside your LMS. (Preferably html 5) You might hen follow that up with a review or opportunity to get students thoughts and then finally use the built in quizzing of your LMS to deliver exams/evaluations. So basically it might look like this in the course.
Video Overview (delivered to any device)
Interactivity (raptivity/engage/etc.)
Overview/Thoughts Doc (Gdocs)
Quizzing/Evaluation (use your LMS system)
Why? You never want your material to be dependent on one program or system. For instance, if your LMS service went down (Canvas was down for close to a day not long ago) then you have your short videos hosted on another site, students could access them even if Canvas/LMS was down. Same thing with Gdocs. They could also collaborate on Gdocs if the LMS was not available. If Gdocs is down, they still have the video/interaction.
A lot of people here use Quizmaker for quizzing, but unless you need the design capabilities I would suggest the internal LMS quiz module is probably better. If you have to modify one question, you need to republish Quizmaker, whereas you can change/delete one question in your LMS in a snap. You also have easy question/analysis, ability for students to create quiz questions, etc. It's also typically much easier to move those questions somewhere else because they are in a text based format. This also allows you to save the quizzes/provide grade reports from within the LMS which is becoming more common.
My main point is that for most things except quizzing, you could just be linking within your LMS system to the files in the cloud somewhere (Dropbox is another option for files or Amazon) so which LMS system you use shouldn't really matter. It does to most people today because they don't think about life beyond their current LMS provider and they design in a way that limits moving to something else. We might all be using Wordpress 5 years from now as an LMS or we might be using edx (Standford just signed up to deliver their MOOC courses) but if you create content in a way that's not dependent on any one provider or software program, you'll be way ahead of the game. In fact, edx just announced they were opening up their system including xblock.
https://www.edx.org/press/stanford-to-work-with-edx
The basic premise is that you should be able to plugin existing learning objects within any course which is basically what I'm advocating you create. It sounds like that's pretty much what you've done but just upload those resources (broken apart) to stand alone and link to them so that you can then plug and play in any system.
Todd
We have started using a subscription based LMS called Litmos. Maybe it would work for you?
Matthew,
Thanks for that information. I am looking at the Litmos site now. I may give it a try for a few weeks to see how easy the interface works with multiple SCORM packages.
Thanks!
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Todd-
Thanks so much for your thoughtful and generous reply. You hit on a number of conclusions I have already come to. The course I designed my materials for is a hybrid. I don't use any short videos for stand- alone instruction, because much of that is done face-to-face. That said, my "Quizmaker" content generates study activities for my students. I would like to venture into more online video delivery (the stand-alone variety) but have my hands full already battling the current challenges. At some point, I could scale back face-to-face even further but not until I know I have dependable solutions. I am currently helping test Sharestream at our institution, so I have space for those videos there as well if I can ever get all the pieces tied together and figure out the best external platforms for each of my e-learning delivery sets.
The SCORM portion has been the MOST frustrating. My hope is not to move all my content just the SCORM packages into an environment where they will work. I simply need data on who did the work and did they pass or fail. It would be nice to have a host of other things such as easy interface, seamless integration, limited coding... etc, but I would settle for bare bones.
All of my other material such as tests are created in the test tool IN Canvas. The text works fine, as does the scoring, but video has been consistently problematic, especially since their most recent upgrades. I am living with it for now and hope their Kaltura will catch up with us. If not, your suggestions have given me ample food for thought.
Your suggestion to “not have all my eggs in one basket” resonated with me. Going through our recent migration has been painful and the thumbs up encouragement to “just rebuild, don’t roll over!” that went with it seemed to lack proper insight in that most of us have collected years of work. “Rebuilding” was a tedious and painful process that often made me wonder how my content could live elsewhere and then plug into the LMS. So- I agree with you on that front for sure.
I think having the potential to publish to HTML will help in many ways(awaiting new Articulate release). I am still “flash” based and the browser interaction is unstable and often unpredictable. I am looking at external tools to help me start offloading tasks that are failing in Canvas. By the way; I was in on the recent one day Canvas fail but it really pales in comparison to the bug infested waters I have found myself in this semester. I think 85% of my problem goes to the statement you made that “You never want your material to be dependent on one program or system”. Trust me, I think about life beyond my current LMS all the time! It’s now time to examine and explore those external tools and see how I can make the best of the situation!
Your suggestions have been so helpful and wonderfully supportive. Thanks!!
Hi Allie,
Are you hosting your materials inside of Canvas? That is, have you uploaded all the files into Canvas? I have found that Canvas doesn't always play nice with Flash content. I also have some older Engage content in one of my classes. It works, but is really slow. I haven't had any complaints about not being able to access the interactions, just that they have been very slow.
At the University where I work, we use Storyline, but externally host the Storyline content using iframes in Canvas. That has worked well for us, with several benefits. I haven't experimented with externally hosting Engage content but will see if it helps, and then get back to you. Even if you do externally host your Engage interactions, you would still not be able to capture the data from SCORM. Canvas uses LTI not SCORM. There was some discussion about SCORM on one of the Instructure listservs. I'd have to go back and read it.
Please send me a private message, and I can explain how we have worked with Articulate content.
I experimented with externally hosting the Engage content. The interaction loaded faster and I didn't get any warnings in either Chrome or Firefox.
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